It's very disappointing that we've withdrawn our reserve team. But with the likes of Jonah Cunningham, Wellington and Ricky Bailey all leaving it did look like the writing was on the wall.

Having a proper reserve league isn't the answer to everything by any means, but it would help increase the active player pool participating regularly in games. As well as providing game time for fringe players, it means that players returning from injury have an opportunity to get back up to speed as well. It's the response that not having a reserve team "has served the club well" that sums it up. Reserve squads will be of more benefit directly to some clubs than others, but by having an active league at that level it should help the game overall. It's certainly not a solution in itself, but something that would (imo) have a noticeable impact across the board after 3 or 4 years of bedding in.

Agreed.

I don't necessarily disagree with that sentiment, but I do find it frustrating how much the idea of a reserves league gets thrown around as an answer to so many of the game's challenges.

If we have a defined purpose and goal for a reserves league, then that would be a start but as we saw with what we had previously, different clubs see the purpose of reserves in different lights. If player development is one such goal, do SL academy players learn more in a reserve league that they do, for example, on loan to a Championship club? Have the likes of Jimmy Keinhorst or Ash Handley developed more whilst on dual registraion at Featherstone, or Mikolaj Oledzki at Bradford, than they would have playing other 'fringe' players? We'll never know definitively, but that doesn't automatically make one system better than the other - and yet that's often how the reserves league is portrayed.

And I don't think its necessarily wrong for clubs to look at if from a "what works for us" perspective. I'm not going to run the numbers now, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful of clubs in the top three tiers that don't have, or haven't recently had, an ex-Leeds academy graduate in their squad. The approach that Leeds are taking, with or without a reserve team, is benefitting the wider sport - the club have more than done their bit on the talent pool side of things.

When it comes to the talent pool, there's also the argument that the reserves is too late. What we need is a greater volume of players coming into the game to begin with, and a better quality of player coming into the game at junior level. If that means that resources are put into engaging community coaching, improving amateur facilities and structures, and academies, that's arguably better than putting resources in trying to polish 'rough diamonds' that are too good / old for academy rugby, but not up to first team standard.

I'd be interested to see how many players we are actually losing from the sport due to a lack of reserve league, if indeed we are. I know there are some high profile proponents of the system that claim that they would have been lost to the game without it, but many of these are speaking from a hypothetical perspective. There's nothing to say that Jamie Peacock wouldn't have spent a year on loan, or that he wouldn't have made his Bradford debut earlier than he did, if we didn't have a loan system. The claim that we lose players due to a lack of reserves is often made, but has anyone actually looked at it objectively?

A reserve side or "A" team may well be the right way to bring in new players and help senior players back to match fitness following a lay off.
However, it has to be all or nothing and what we have currently (with so few clubs operating reserve sides) is not really working.
Would it be a better option to allow say a maximum of 2 or 3 "overage" players to drop down into the senior academy sides ?

When Hull KR were first promoted, iirc, it was 16s, 18s and 20s with three overage players allowed in the last. Or something like that. Then they went to 16 and 19s and about that time brought in dual-reg.

I think either of those work. I largely agree with what the printer says about a reserves system though. For super league clubs i’m not sure there is a sweet spot where it is both affordable and useful. If SL teams need to be seen to do their bit, I think redistributing more money to Championship 1 teams makes more sense rather than creating another level below that.

Given the current power structure of the game, the champ 1 clubs would likely pay a price in terms of independence though. The partnerships Rovers and Hull have established with York and Doncaster seem to be running smoothly, but there seems to be an assumption, among fans of the SL pair at least, that they’re de facto reserve teams. And it doesn’t look completely unjustified.