2017–18 was the season in which the club’s off the field work reached Twickenham, and the season it became an RFU accredited club.

Pride, and the first Pride Olympics

The summer before the season began was given over to Pride. Members supported Trafford Pride, Levenshulme Pride and Stockport Pride through July 2017, and in August an International Gay Rugby side of volunteers from English inclusive clubs went to Chester Pride. For Manchester Pride the club issued a Players and Members Guide covering the weekend of Thursday 24 to Monday 28 August. It instructed members that they must not be seen badly intoxicated in Spartans gear, and must not wear the club crest to any fetish event.

On the Thursday the club staged the inaugural Pride Olympics on Canal Street from 7pm with its sponsors Bar Pop and Via. It opened with a torch carried down Canal Street by a Spartan and a drag queen to light the Pride Olympic flame. Miss Penny hosted, with performers from Via, Viva La Diva and Bar Pop. Rugby players played drag queens, Bar Pop played Via, and the Spartan forwards played the backs. There was a tug of war, and a finale billed as a Spartans Drag Race, whose winners were to switch on the Canal Street fairy lights at about nine o’clock.

The rest of the weekend was worked as hard. On the Friday morning Christian Davis and Yoshio Tazaki manned a miniature Expo stall at the employee Pride event of the media agency Dentsu Aegis Network. On the Saturday and Sunday it ran an Expo stall in the Bloom Street NCP car park, with James McRobert coordinating the volunteers. Louise Sanderson-Kirk, mother of the player Joshua Sanderson-Kirk, hosted the traditional champagne brunch before the parade on the Saturday morning.

The parade theme was Class of 2017: The Graduation Parade, and the Spartans walked as the classes of 1998 to 2017, led by club president Jonathan Mayor. He was pulled along the route on a chariot with Louise Sanderson-Kirk. Six members carried the club’s large Pride flag, decorated with an additional twenty two Manchester bees in support of the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing. Former players who had established the club in 1998 walked with them, and friends from other International Gay Rugby clubs joined the entry. The weekend closed at the vigil in Sackville Park on the Monday evening.

The First XV

The first team, captained by Karl “Karlos” Bee, opened in the Halbro North West Intermediate League on 2 September with a 78–19 win over Broughton Park 3s: a hat trick for Simon “Chucky” Gammon, two tries each for Harry and Callum and one each for David T, Karlos, Phil and Andy R. It was as good a day as the side would have until spring.

The archive records two first team matches on 16 September, both lost. At Helsby the Spartans led 8–5 at half time through a Chucky try and a Karlos penalty, and lost 13–26. At Bedians they were level at 24 apiece at the break and lost 43–41. A 21–19 win at Lymm on 21 October was the last victory for five weeks. Anselmians came to Sale Sports Club for the first time a week later and won 43–10, Chucky and AJ scoring for the Spartans.

Carrington won at home in early November, against three second half tries from Chucky, Andy L and Sam L. Wirral won 43–31 at Sale on 11 November; Sam L scored twice, AJ, Callum and Chucky once each, and Karlos landed three conversions. The exception was Congleton on 25 November, a 40–8 win in what the club described as a very wet, very cold mud bath. Sam, AJ, Harry and Callum scored, Matt scored twice, and the skipper kicked five conversions. Liverpool St Helens then won 68–19 at Sale on 2 December, Chucky scoring twice and Sam Luke once.

The turn came in February. Lymm 3s were beaten 76–5 at home on 3 February. March brought a defeat at Aldwinians 3s and a 62–0 loss at Wirral in wet and muddy conditions. The side then finished with three wide wins: 58–19 against Congleton 2s on 24 March, 53–10 against Aldwinians 3s on 14 April, and 77–12 away at Broughton Park on 21 April in the final fixture. The club noted afterwards that it awaited the Division 3 South final table to know what the run had been worth.

Two Saturdays had been lost to the weather along the way. On 9 December the First XV’s last league game of 2017, away at Aldwinians, went when their pitch was declared unfit, and the Second XV’s fixture against Didsbury, moved to Sale the day before when Didsbury’s own pitches failed, followed when Sale froze across large parts with no thaw due; a good number of the club met in town that afternoon instead. On 3 March both the first and second team fixtures at Sale were called off on the condition of the pitch.

The Second XV

The second team played in Division 5 East and had a hard year of it. Old Bedians 3rds conceded their home fixture on 25 November, which gave the Spartans the win and the league points. Beyond that, the surviving results are defeats. Manor Park 3rd XV won 60–10 in January and Aldwinians 4s won 64–7 in February. Old Bedians 3s took the return at Sale 39–20, the Spartans scoring through Cameron, Phil and two from Will. Marple won 63–33. The final day was an 89–12 defeat at home, though the club recorded that the side had great match support. Will Curvis was the team’s Player of the Year.

The club consulted its members through the season about where the First and Second XVs should play, and about the demands the fixture list was placing on player availability. The second team’s place in its league was among the questions put, and the members were clear that they wanted the side to stay in it.

The Third XV

The third team, captained by John Copestake and coached by club director Gareth Longley, played in the International Gay Rugby Northern England League. Leeds Hunters won at Sale in October. Newcastle Ravens won 77–0 there in November, in the club’s first Northern League meeting of the season, which the Spartans called a great learning curve. The side’s win came on 16 December, 19–15 at home to the Liverpool Tritons, with two tries from Christian, one from Cameron and two conversions from Jon W. The return at the Tritons in January was lost. On 13 January the club found itself playing in both the Halbro league and the IGR Northern England League on the same afternoon, and lost both matches.

The thirds also gave a new club its start. On 21 October the team and the club’s new recruits played the Sheffield Vulcans at Sale Sports Club in the Vulcans’ first ever match, a friendly development game; players from Chester Centurions and the Liverpool Tritons came along too.

Touch

Touch rugby grew from a strand into a section. In July 2017 Carl’s Coyotes, a team made up of Spartans and Kings Cross Steelers players, won Touch My Brum. New sessions for adults aged eighteen and over were announced in August and began on Friday 8 September, with free taster sessions during Freshers Week. In late October training moved to a 3G pitch at Wright Robinson for a seven week Monday block, and the touch year ended on 11 December with a mini Christmas Cup between four Spartans teams. O2 Touch returned to Sale Sports Club on 9 April. On 23 June the squad won five of its six matches to be crowned overall winners of the Lancaster University touch tournament.

Ben Dawson was credited with creating the O2 Touch squad, a mixed gender group of more than forty new players. The work increased female membership of the club and let it offer rugby to the wider LGBTQI community in a low contact form. Terri Collier was the section’s first Touch Player of the Year. By March the club was describing itself as three union teams and a touch squad, open to anyone regardless of gender, sexuality or rugby ability.

Try For Change, and two days at Twickenham

The club ran a Try For Change project through the season, funded through Comic Relief and England Rugby, with Gaydio as partner organisation. The Spartans were one of eleven projects in the programme across the United Kingdom. Its objective was to introduce forty young LGBT and straight men aged 18 to 25 to rugby union, men who had never played or who had had negative experiences of sport. The first block, twenty seven of them, trained together over twelve weeks in early 2018, with Gareth Longley one of the project coaches. The project ran while the mixed gender touch squad was being established, and many participants chose to stay with the club playing touch rather than union.

On 16 February four Spartans went to Twickenham as representatives of the club’s participants. They watched the England squad’s open training session in front of 10,000 fans and followed the royal party down the players’ tunnel. On the pitch they were given a masterclass by Joe Launchbury, Danny Care, Sam Underhill and Jonny Wilkinson, watched from the try line by the Duke of Sussex. The club was one of three Try For Change groups, and the only LGBT club, selected to meet Prince Harry privately in the away team changing rooms. The party also spoke with Ben Calveley, the RFU’s Head of Corporate Affairs, with chair Andy Cosslett and with president John Spencer. PinkNews and the Italian outlet Gay.it covered the day. A month later, on 17 March, four Spartans played in the half time Try For Change match on the grass at Twickenham, in front of 80,000 spectators at the NatWest Six Nations match between England and Ireland.

The broadcasters followed. Spartans were live on BBC Radio Manchester in February, and on a Sport Relief podcast and a discussion about homophobia on BBC 5 Live. The club had eight minutes on BBC 5 Live Sport on 23 March, the day England Rugby published an article headed “Manchester Spartans continue to break down barriers”. In December some of the members had turned up in the audience of BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing, cheering on the finalists.

RFU accreditation

The chair, Dean Bee, had been working with the RFU since the previous autumn to secure accreditation, a process that required evidence of the club’s governance. On 25 January 2018 the club announced that it had become an official RFU Accredited Club, joining more than six hundred accredited clubs across England. Bryan Davies, President of Cheshire RFU, presented the certificate and plaques to the chair after a home match at Sale Sports Club. The accreditation was written up on page eleven of February’s Touchline magazine. The club was, the chair noted at the time, nearly twenty years old and running three men’s teams and a mixed gender touch team.

Two new sports therapists joined the medical team, covering the first and second teams and holding Wednesday clinics, and a new Community and Partnerships Officer role was created to build relationships with local charities and to support players off the pitch. The club also won a new set of rugby posts in the #sadrugbyposts competition in September. They were installed by the following July.

Three new clubs

Dean Bee was England representative for International Gay Rugby as well as club chair, and worked with the RFU under the Spirit of Rugby project. Its official ambassador was the former England player and World Cup winner Maggie Alphonsi. International Gay Rugby had more than ninety member clubs worldwide by October 2017, and three of the newest were in the North West. Chester Centurions RUFC was established in early autumn 2017 as Chester’s first gay and inclusive rugby union club and the fourteenth active inclusive club in England. The Sheffield Vulcans played their first match at Sale in October, and in late January the Vulcans and the Centurions played each other for the first time, in Manchester, hosted by the Spartans. The creation of the Liverpool Tritons, the Vulcans and the Centurions was credited to the club’s recruitment work, which had run through a Summer Pride Tour and a national radio and Facebook campaign called Fear Less. Give Rugby a Try.

Off the field

The club raised £705 for the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund, the appeal set up after the Arena bombing of May 2017 to support the bereaved and the injured. Spartans players appeared in the 2018 Naked Rugby Players Calendar, every copy carrying a donation to Balls to Cancer, and the sales figures have earned their place in the record: four sold by September and, at Pride of all weekends, not one.

Representatives went to the Barclays Spectrum September Soiree in aid of the LGBT Foundation, and in December the club supported an LGBT Foundation Rainbow Rebel in the Turkey Dash. The squad trained in Stonewall rainbow laces on 29 November. Across the year the club attended LGBT employee events held by Vodafone, Worldpay, Barclays and Dentsu Aegis, and at the Vodafone event in September the rugby league player Keegan Hirst spoke alongside panellists from Stonewall. In March the club publicly thanked the player Jamie Shillcock for calling out homophobic remarks during a match.

Bar Pop and Via were the club’s sponsors through the season, and in October Bar Pop’s owner John Hamilton was described as a long time supporter. Sale Sharks had supported the club for years, including special coaching sessions, and a session with their first team was being arranged for the summer.

At the end of March the club announced the death of Pete Oldam, a long term friend and former player, and raised a glass in his memory at the Easter Bash.

Woodford RFC brought their Mad for it in Manchester tour to Sale in April and won 54–25, and the day was remembered as much for the welcome on both sides as for the score. Both clubs laced up in Rainbow Laces, and that evening the Woodford players lined the stairs to give a Spartan a guard of honour.

The Bingham Cup in Amsterdam

Planning for Amsterdam had started in September. The chair worked with the club’s travel company to find three city centre hotels close to one another, while the captains found out who would travel to play. More than fifty Spartans went in June 2018, fielding two teams. On 9 June the A team beat the Philadelphia Gryphons 15–0 in a Bowl and Shield quarter final and the B team lost 12–10 to Libera Rugby Club in the Challenger Spoon. The campaign ended the following day, the A team losing 43–0 to the Washington Renegades and the B team 50–7 to a strong Portland side. The Sydney Convicts won the tournament. Over the weekend the club member Cilla appeared on the poster for, and featured in, the Rugby is my Pride photographic exhibition. Reporting back in July, the Director of Rugby judged the trip mostly positive, but thought it would have been better with two squads of twenty five and earlier planning by members.

The year’s honours

The season began with the club as runner up in the National Lottery Good Causes Awards 2017, beaten by parkrun UK. The awards were broadcast on BBC One on 27 September and presented by Ore Oduba, who had been hosted with the awards team at Bar Pop. The campaign drew support from the England captain Dylan Hartley, Maggie Alphonsi and Nigel Owens. In April the club was nominated at the Cheshire President’s Volunteers Awards Evening for the new O2 Touch team and for the IGR Spirit of Rugby campaign, and the chair won Volunteer of the Year in the Community Engagement category for Cheshire County RFU.

In June three Spartans volunteers were nominated for the Mitsubishi Motors Volunteer of the Year Awards: Ben Dawson for building the touch squad, Yosh Tazaki for the films and campaign materials that carried the club’s name, and Dean Bee for the recruitment work across England. The chair won the regional award and went forward to the national finals at Twickenham in September.

The club’s own awards evening followed at the end of June, with seventy two people at the annual dinner.

Into the next season

The annual general meeting in May drew forty six votes, though the signing in register went astray and only thirty seven of those present could afterwards be recalled by name. By the July committee meeting the new posts were up and the pitch work was waiting for the heatwave to break. The Director of Rugby had set two coaching objectives for the year ahead, Having More Fun and Positive Growth Mindset and Environment, both intended to boost positivity in team talks and on the pitch. Registration for the 2019 Union Cup was to open in October.