This season we have seen a large number of new players join the club across many age groups which is a brilliant success story which we are keen to continue. However, it has brought its own logistical challenge on a Sunday morning as we try and fit cars into the car park and larger playing squads onto the same pitch space. This has necessitated asking coaches and club officials to park behind the posts on the training pitch and teams to stagger kick off times.

This is obviously a great problem to have and one many other clubs would be jealous of but I’m very grateful that everyone is working collaboratively with the section chairs to make it work. This cooperation will be needed more than ever as the winter weather conditions hit and we try and protect our playing surfaces.

In my last update I celebrated our under 15s on their great achievement of winning the league and I’m pleased to report that during November we had some very big wins across our age groups. In the last two weeks our under 16s beat Hazlemere 25-5 and Twickenham 23-0.

It’s not all about success on the pitch and last Saturday morning our Owls captain and Under 15s coach Michael O’Connor organised a working party to plant the 600 tree saplings we received recently from the Woodlands trust. The plan is to plant these samplings in a number of planting troughs around the clubhouse and allocate a trough for each of our age groups to look after and nurture. The plan then is for that age group to plant there trees around our perimeter when they become colts players.

Last Sunday our colts took the short trip to Richmond RFC where a win 40-0 win saw them crowned as league champions. We really do have a very talented group of young players coming through our colts and our under 15s/16s and we are really seeing the benefit of our colts spending pre season training alongside our senior squad. A number of our older colts have also been turning out regularly for our super 2s and when our 1s travelled to Hove recently our colts winger Tom Samler became the first 17 year old to represent the club in a league game in a generation. Congratulations Tom.