A message from our Club President:

Ennis RFC President, Johnny King

As president of Ennis Rugby Football Club I should like to welcome you to our website for this season 2008/2009.

As we continue to build site, we’ve been blessed this season to get Pat Flynn to come on board as PRO. Pat is a working journalist and experienced broadcaster and he will be invaluable to us particularly in the use of this site. His first action was to add a Club News page. It just goes to show how someone with his experience can enhance our efforts. I have always said we need to get the best possible use from this very valuable resource.

We hope in this year to reach more of our members, coaches, supporters locally and indeed the general Ennis diaspora throughout the world (even Brian Considine in Brussels and Colin Murphy in Australia and Junior Guinnane in the states. You bucks will even be able to contact us)  with updates on what is happening in our club over the coming season. I would ask you to bookmark this site on your computer and have a look regularly for fixtures, new etc and if we are not up to scratch on what you need from this site let us know and we’ll do our best to put it right.

Obviously I would like to wish the club captain Michael Mc Inerney and all our players well for the season. Macca and the players have a hard year ahead of them and they deserve all of our support. 

Our coaches at both adult and underage levels contribute enormously to our club in terms of time, effort and commitment to our players of all ages. As we have introduced a new coaching structure with the intention of producing, more skilful, disciplined, fitter players. It’s a work in progress and hopefully in this season will see the beginning of their hard work. However, it’s true test will take time. 

Also, we have just completed a very successful tag tournament run over the summer months with training beginning in April and running on Thursday’s up to the end of July with a very successful finals night. This tournament has introduced a number of new people to the club and we hope to continue with a tag programme and the blitz organised by the players at the end proved a successful and enjoyable day. For me it was great to see our senior players stepping up to the mark and organising this fundraiser. Hopefully it will be bigger and better next season. 

Like everything in this club, this has come about by voluntary effort, Alan Considine and his team are to be congratulated for organising the “official” tournament and the players for the “Tag Blitz”, but we must not forget the people who staffed the bar, the barbeque, cleaned the clubhouse and took care of all the other “unseeing” work that goes into this club. What can I say but well done to all.

As you can see from my last few remarks we depend on volunteerism completely, be it in club administration, coaching, playing or generally helping out on occasions. During my presidency I want to recognise that voluntary effort, they say volunteerism is in decline, but I believe you would not say that if you were to see the marvellous people we have working here for all our good, especially the younger members. It beholds us older people to encourage and promote these people, just as on the playing field we need to nurture our player, we also have a responsibility to our future administrators to ensure the good work continues.  

The vein of every sporting club in this country is that dirty word money, we have been fortunate enough to receive funding through the sports capital funding programme (lotto to you and me).  While thinking on this I’ve realise what we have achieved on the facilities side in the last number of years. An extension of seven new dressing rooms, treatment room, referees room and shower suite.

Two state of the art third generation, floodlit all weather pitches. Repaired our boundary wall, office, shop, resurfaced our car park and as I type the equipment for the new gym is manufactured and enroute to us. I’ve also realised it takes between two and three years from concept to completion and a lot of hard work, but it’s better than rattling boxes. For this work to continue and we have plans in place for the next development. We need that dirty word. I would appeal to you all to support our members and friends draw again this season.

But we are extremely lucky to have a number of local sponsors who support us annually, be in taking advertisement, in our season programme, advertisements in the club, and companies like Roche Ireland who have been with us for years.

I have not yet included our main club sponsor Monitor, Tom and Sharon Malone have been extremely good to us in last season and indeed for a number of years, not only has Tom supplied us with two fine player he has now put his money up front, I can only hope we do you both and indeed all our sponsors proud in this season. I genuinely do hope that our association with Monitor is beneficial and long lasting for both of us. When we were awarded the Irish Examiner/Munster Rugby junior club of the year award I think Sharon was more please than a lot of us.

On behalf of players, coaches, committee and myself, I can only thank you our sponsors, really I can’t find the words to express how vital you are to our efforts and how grateful we are to you on behalf of our community.

Speaking of community, we must realise we are only a small part of this community and I would welcome all of you to our club, if you feel you have something to contribute on or off the field or indeed just to get a breath of fresh air on a weekend and come up and watch a game or two.

The success of Munster winning our second Heineken has yet again seen an increase of numbers at under age to the extent that we will be fielding two sides the Ennis Reds and the Ennis Blacks in the mini section this season. We have in excess of 500 registered under age players. Challenging us to look after these players is taxing but it’s the sort of challenge we want. Each of these boys and girls has talents and we have much to offer in terms of life skill to be learned. Every boy or girl who enters our gates will be treated with respect and I believe they will Ennis Rugby Football Club (hopefully in a long time) better people.

Finally, I would again like to wish you all well for the coming season, I long for success as much as any of you, but I also realise it’s not just about wining cups and medals, the coach who gets the best from his or her players, the successful tag tournament, the welcome for our guest in a clean homely clubhouse, represents what we are about just as much as a league or cup win or indeed the club of the year award. However I also believe we will be celebrating success on the field, we have the player, the coaches and the commitment all we need now is a little luck.

Thank You.

Johnny King

Club President