History of the Junior Section at Yarnbury

Yarnbury play their club rugby at Brownberrie Lane in Horsforth, Leeds. The Juniors first started in the 1972-3 season and were the second junior club formed in the immediate area, following Huddersfield who formed a few weeks earlier.

This was down to Bob Barber who saw an article about Huddersfield starting a junior section, and he decided to try to follow suit. Having put an advert in the Yorkshire Evening Post about 20 children turned up on the first Sunday, with about 100 children,aged between 8 – 11 turning up the following week. Within 6 weeks, and with thanks to many parents, the Yarnbury Junior section was up and running properly, with their very first 7s tournament hosted within 12 months.

Junior sections were already underway in New Zealand and Bob Barber decided to read up all on all he could find on how they did things ‘down under’. At their second 7s tournament he decided to run it on the NZ lines and grade the players by weight and not age.

He borrowed the scales from a butcher in Rawdon and every player was weighed and graded at the beginning of the tournament. However this caused at lot of arguments with coaches complaining that when some players had a pound or so of mud on them they were in the wrong weight category – so this idea was abandoned!