Hi all, following the weekend's EGM, a new coaching structure was voted into place for the coming season consisting of myself as Director of Rugby / Head Coach, Martin Heavey for Forwards and Mark Scoltock (Phantoms RL Coach) for Backs.

I want to firstly thank Tony Quinn for his efforts over the past seven years as coach, it should not be forgotten that the trophies this club has won were won under him.

But now, we need to look to the future. In the next couple of weeks I will be looking to contact all of the players individually, see what they are looking to achieve, how we can help and what they are prepared to offer the club in terms of commitment. I will also be making contact with a number of former players to ask about the possibilty of them returning to the club, I have always believed that sometimes looking backwards can help you go forwards too. Indeed, I have already had positive responses from one or two.

Of course though, the long term future and success of this club is in the new players we attract from here and we will be looking to hold structured recruitment events, leaflet drops etc. Whilst the days of hitting the Walkabout will always be a part of this club, to use them as our best means of recruitment isn't really good enough so we will look to improve this area too.

I looked at pictures from our first game of the season at Stanford....looked at the pack...it looked strong....looked ready.....looked competitive. Where did it go wrong?? Every one of those players is still involved, everyone of those players wants to play for this club, even if sometimes they are unable to. When you consider this and the players we have added since....real good quality players....everything appears to be in place for a great season if we can just achieve consistency in our lineup.

As much as possible, players will be played in their best positions, sometimes this is unavoidable but with greater depth this will hopefully become an obsolete point. We take away from our strengths when we remove our best players from those positions to fill in the gaps....I mean I'd rather be a mobile prop who offers something around the park than a flanker who is off the pace and can't offer anything from a scrummaging standpoint. It's these tough questions about all of us that need to be answered and they will be in time. Let's have a couple of positions that we can excel at rather than 5 or 6 where we don't quite hit the mark.

I will hopefully bring my own style to training, mix things up a little, keeping it interesting whilst never losing the focus on improvement for Saturday's game. With the help of Martin we will scour every inch of material available to formulate a plan for the forwards, including good, workable setpieces which need to become the cornerstone of our strategy, not the problem that stops us going anywhere.

Mark Scoltock, with 30 years of Rugby League behind him will bring something new to the backline, anyone who has seen the impact that League has had both in defence and attack will know there is ground to be gained here for us.

It's a new start, it's our 10th season, it just simply has to be a better one than last season. I, along with Martin and Mark, will do all we can to improve the depth and quality of the squad, make training as constructive as possible and ensure that by the time we play our first games of 2010 - 11 we are prepared and ready to improve.

David Yems
Director of Rugby
Phantoms RFC