Rugby stopped in 2020–21, yet more people joined the Spartans than in any season in the club’s history. There was no fixture to be picked for, no contact allowed for months at a time and no clubhouse to drink in, and still the club put over a hundred people into training every week and passed 160 members by the summer.

They were not joining for a season. There was no season. They were joining for the Spartans, and by the end of the year England Rugby was using this club to show other clubs how it should be done.

A division that never got started

The First XV began the year in NWIL Division 4 East, at Level 11, placed in division 4 after three seasons in division 3 so that it would play more local clubs. The division proved academic. There were no fixtures at all between the start of the season in September 2020 and 23 January 2021, not a game played and not a game arranged, and the ten finally scheduled from that January were every one of them postponed or never played. Four further slots in the division were never arranged.

The tournaments went the same way. The Union Cup, due in Birmingham in 2021, was put back to 2023. Whatever this season was going to be, it would not be decided on a pitch.

More new players than ever, yet not a game to play

By 3 November 2020 the club had registered 31 new pure union players, 15 dual players and 14 pure touch players, five of them women, with a dozen more brought in through the October 2020 introduction to touch run by Jennifer and Adam Brimelow. The chair’s report counted over a hundred individuals training each week, the highest the club had known, and more than 160 fee paying members by the time of the annual general meeting.

The week grew to hold them. Saturday sessions for new rugby union players joined Monday touch and Wednesday union, and women’s only touch was trialled on Thursday evenings. A club with nothing to select for opened more ways in than it had ever had.

Captains and coaches

Simon Gammon, a Spartan since 2013, was elected First XV captain for a second season, with Harry Ellis as vice captain. David Fox, known as Cilla and ten years a Spartan, took the Second XV, working with a new coach in Scott Melville. Sam Iddon stepped up from second team vice captain to captain the first touch team, with Tom Bird-Jones as his vice and Ian Stoddart captaining the second.

The club advertised in October 2020 for a First XV rugby union coach of any gender to work alongside its Director of Rugby. Ale Lewis, a level 3 qualified professional coach, joined during the season and Tom Bird-Jones came on as assistant coach. The touch section kept its paid professional coaches, Jennifer and Adam Brimelow, and Jennifer became an England national coach during the year.

A club that met on screen

With no pitch to meet on, the Spartans built a season online. Neil Gallagher of Pyramid Performance led lockdown personal training sessions on Zoom and Facebook Live, open to members of any International Gay Rugby club: 38 were delivered in 2020, they restarted on 22 January 2021 and ended on 6 April with close to fifty in all, all of them kept on the club’s YouTube channel. Around them ran coach and captain led theory sessions, Six Nations watch parties, quizzes and socials. Deiniol Davies produced the club’s first newsletter in December 2020, intended to run quarterly.

The Christmas party that ended up on England Rugby’s channels

The club’s Christmas party was held on Zoom in December 2020, and it was the biggest it had ever staged. More than eighty players and members joined, with free takeaway, presents, activities and Spartans Oddballs hats sent out to them beforehand. The evening ran from a welcome and a meal through captains’ speeches, breakout rooms and a visit from Santa to a Twelve Gays of Christmas segment, and the whole two and a half hours was recorded and put on the members’ page alongside a homage video the members had made themselves.

It also cleared unfinished business. The 2019–20 awards had gone unpresented when that year’s annual dinner was postponed, so they were given out at last: Ali Cooper First XV Player of the Year, Ian Stoddart Second XV Player of the Year, Caradoc Morris Touch Player of the Year, Simon Gammon Players’ Player of the Year and Tom Bird-Jones the Chair’s Award. The trophies had to be delivered to players or handed over at training rather than presented on the night.

Four months later, clips of that party were on England Rugby’s own channels.

The club English rugby pointed to

In April 2021 England Rugby made the Spartans the story it told about the return of O2 Touch. Its film marked the restart of the game and looked back at how the club had kept its community together through the lockdowns, narrated by Tom Bird-Jones, who had spent the first lockdown making scrubs for frontline NHS workers, and it used footage of the Spartans’ Christmas party to do it. A season with no rugby in it had produced the material the governing body chose to show other clubs.

It was not the only approach the club had that year. For Rainbow Laces Day the Spartans worked with the Government Equalities Office to share members’ stories, and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport shared a short film made by the London Film School and commissioned by Sport Allies and Sky Sports. A Sport England photographer came to training in December 2020, and in January 2021 the club appeared in the launch materials for Sport England’s Uniting The Movement strategy. In March 2021 Gaylife Magazine Manchester published an article on the understanding of HIV and AIDS through the years, written by the club’s honorary president, Dr Marlon Morais. By June 2021 television production companies were approaching the club directly.

Back on the grass

In December 2020 the RFU moved its return to play guidance from stage A straight to stage E, and the club planned to take up adapted contact rugby in January 2021, with training expected back on the 6th and a session for prospective new union players on the 9th. The return came later, and in stages. Touch training resumed at Sale Sports Club on 29 March 2021, in Covid secure groups run by Jennifer and Adam, and union training followed on 5 April. The administration of the period survives in its own way: thirty two players filed health screening declarations for the Monday touch session of 10 May 2021.

The first rugby the club played all season was touch. The squads met Typhoons RUFC in a friendly at Sale on 24 May 2021, watched by players from Chester Centurions RUFC, and travelled to Typhoons for the return on 25 June. The season’s one tournament came on 17 July 2021 at Sutton Coldfield Rugby Club, where four Spartans squads entered Touch My Brum. Team Old Boys won the Vase, Team Instinct reached the Vase semi final, and Team Valor and Team Mystic reached the quarter finals of the Shield and the Tankard.

Women’s touch

The Thursday women’s only sessions ran as a trial. The first O2 Touch Women’s Welcome Session was advertised for 20 May 2021 and the sessions began at Sale on 2 June, with a women’s touch team as the stated aim in the long run. The chair’s report was candid that the club had struggled to keep its female players, and set retention at all levels as the focus for the following season. The touch section also intended to move from a first and second team structure towards a social team and a tournament team.

Speaking up for trans players

The year gave the club time to argue a case, and it used it. In October 2020 the Spartans published a statement in support of International Gay Rugby following World Rugby’s announcement on transgender players, and vice-chair Joshua Sanderson-Kirk issued the club’s Trans Day of Remembrance statement on 28 November 2020.

The club’s diversity and inclusion committee opposed the RFU’s requirement that trans rugby union players register, saying that it went against the club’s values as an inclusive team, that the club would not ask any trans player to comply, and that it would support trans players in whatever they chose. On Transgender Day of Visibility, 31 March 2021, the club published a statement by Noah Donnelly, who wrote that he was proud to be a Spartan and proud to be trans.

It then took the case beyond its own membership. A poster and online campaign encouraging transgender inclusion in grassroots rugby was announced for the start of the 2021–22 season, supported by Consortium, along with materials for distribution by Inclusive Rugby across the UK: an A5 booklet opening into an A3 poster for club notice boards, vox pop video messages, and an online hub linking to welfare advice and governing body articles. Dean Bee, a former Spartans chair and an International Gay Rugby advisor, said the content had been informed by work with players from the Spartans and from several inclusive clubs across the UK, and especially with transgender and non-binary colleagues; Verity Smith of the IGR social inclusion team contributed a supporting comment. The club also helped the England Touch Association develop and release its transgender and non-binary inclusion policy.

Charity, kit and sponsors

A Hallowe’en fancy dress training event raised £311.50 for Mermaids. In December 2020 the club appealed for warm clothes, gloves, hats and blankets for Adrian Corns to distribute to homeless people in Manchester. New charitable relationships were formed with Mermaids and the Albert Kennedy Trust, both of which were to appear on the new playing kit.

Deiniol Davies and Jamie Walker took on the redesign and ordering of the tops, expected in time for the summer fun day at the end of July 2021. Bar Pop and Via were kept on the kit as a thank you for the support they had given over the years.

Joining Sale Sports Club

In November 2020 the club met Sale Sports Club to discuss closer alignment, and the question went to the annual general meeting held online on 29th June 2021, which asked members to confirm the move to join Sale Sports Club after two decades based there.

Gareth Longley continued as chair and Marlon Morais was confirmed as club president on a two year honorary term, with Chris Eades as medical officer and Noah Donnelly as diversity and inclusion officer.

Two losses

In January 2021 the club offered its condolences on the death of Alice Hoagland, an advocate for the LGBT+ community, a supporter of gay and inclusive rugby and the mother of Mark Bingham, noting that donations could be made in her memory to the Mark Bingham Leadership Fund.

In July 2021 honorary president Marlon Morais-Hall paid tribute to former player John Whittaker, a lifelong ally of the LGBTQ+ community.

What the year came to

The Spartans ended the season larger than they began it and without a fixture to their name, which turned out to be the smaller half of the story. Around fifty players turned out at training in late July 2021, among them Karl, then chair of International Gay Rugby. A summer social was planned at Sale Sports Club for 31 July in place of the annual dinner that restrictions had ruled out, and the new kit was due in time for it. What followed would be played under a different constitution, by a club that had spent a year proving it was more than a fixture list.