The Spartans’ 25th anniversary season, and the year the club completed a move it had been planning for four or five years: becoming the rugby section of Sale Sports Club.

The union season

The club went into 2023–24 with more than 180 members across its union and touch sections, RFU accredited status, a 1XV in NORWIRUL Division 3 and a 2XV and 3XV in the IGR UK League. Alessandra Lewis continued as Director of Rugby Union and Christian Davis was club captain for union. The 1XV opened away to Wilmslow RUFC 2XV on 2 September in its first Division 3 South fixture, with Joe R taking the manager’s player of the match and Andy R the players’ player. The first home game a week later ended in a 42–10 defeat by a strong Moore RUFC side, and a barbecue with the visitors afterwards. Little else of the union fixture list survives in the club’s own records.

Touch

Ben Dawson, the Director of Touch Rugby, gave an account of the section in late July 2023 that describes a section in good order. It had the highest number of active touch members it had ever had. It was developing a genuinely mixed gender squad, with, as he put it, “lots still to do”. New coaches were producing skill development of a kind the club had historically struggled to achieve, and the section was attending the England national mixed series for the first time in four years. There were strong showings in the Wednesday league and the IGR series, good performances at one-off tour events such as the Hadrian Cup, and a plan for development “over the next few years rather than just thinking season to season”.

The Wednesday night league at Carrington produced a club derby on 9 August, the Touch 1s beating the Touch 2s 3–0 with the 2s, by the club’s account, putting up a great fight. Later that month The Manc published a TikTok video about the section. By June 2024 touch training was drawing more than fifty people every week, the section had finished seventh at the second round of the England Touch Mixed National Series, and it had already placed higher in the summer league than ever before with a semi final and a final still to play. It chose not to travel to the last leg of the national series, which fell on the Manchester Pride bank holiday weekend and left little chance of getting a team out. A touch tour to Amsterdam was in planning as the season ended, with Michael Brown sourcing the hotel and securing a favourable rate.

The Bingham Cup in Rome

The Bingham Cup was held in Rome from 22 to 26 May 2024, and the club spent the spring recruiting players, volunteers and supporters for it. By then the Spartans had been to all ten Bingham Cups played to that point, and had hosted the tournament themselves in 2012. Fundraising had begun at the first home match of the season in September, where the welcome barbecue raised money for Rome and for the growth of inclusive rugby. How the side fared in Italy is not recorded in the surviving papers.

Pride, and the club in the city

Pride weekend opened with the annual Gay Olympics on Canal Street, hosted by Bar Pop and Via Canal Street, where the club dedicated its tug of war effort to the late Rob Cox, who had been an integral part of that team. Players went to a performance of the play Safer, linked to Hull Roundheads, as part of Pride’s Superbia programme. The club marched in the parade with what it described as “a load of Parade Virgins”, and members gathered in Sackville Park for the candlelit vigil to remember Spartan friends and members of the wider LGBTQ community. The following weekend some of the 1XV went on to Didsbury Pride after the fixture at Wilmslow.

In September the club announced that a four part Channel 4 series fronted by Ugo Monye, My Right To Move: The Unity Ball, would follow the personal journey of one of the Spartan family, filmed over the summer. A place in the 2024 parade was confirmed before the season closed, with Christian and Dane volunteering to organise the club’s part in it.

Becoming the rugby section of Sale Sports Club

The move to Sale Sports Club had been in planning for several years, delayed first by COVID and then by further hold-ups. It was settled in December 2023 and backdated to 1st August 2023, and from then the Spartans were the rugby section of Sale Sports Club.

What it gave the club was set out at the annual general meeting: assured tenure of the clubhouse, the changing facilities and the bar, the ability to bid for grants jointly with the RFU, the Lawn Tennis Association and the England and Wales Cricket Board, and the ability to negotiate longer leases with Trafford Council. Spartans and pride branding went up inside the clubhouse, and Matt Whiteley, president of the sports club, came to the Spartans’ AGM in July.

The ground

Trafford Council refused the club’s planning application for the redevelopment of the ground, and the appeal that followed was unsuccessful. After a change of political leadership at the council the club set about amending the scheme. Smaller work went on regardless: fertiliser and seed were put down on the main pitch in the autumn, and by July 2024 the second pitch problem that had stopped Trafford Metrovics using their own ground was reported resolved, the pitch fully seeded.

The club off the field

Recruitment was the season’s other story. Some 110 applications arrived between June and October 2023: about a tenth from players who had played at a high competitive level, about a quarter from recreational players, and around 65 per cent from complete novices. The club could not absorb them all at once, and some new members’ start dates were pushed from October 2023 to February 2024. By the executive meeting of June 2024 the figure for the year stood at 231 applications.

Player welfare grew alongside the numbers. The club had its own physiotherapist through the season, ran player education sessions on injury prevention and concussion, and by June 2024 free fitness sessions with a professional personal trainer were open to every member.

A supper night in the autumn was judged a success and led to a run of fundraising events at Brewers, the first on World Aids Day with a donation to George House Trust. The club employs no staff whatever and is managed wholly by volunteers, at hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year.

Twenty five years

A 25th anniversary kit was planned during the year, and the club described the season in its own words as its 25th anniversary as pioneers of gay and inclusive rugby.

The season closed with the annual general meeting on 16th July 2024, and a match against the Kings Cross Steelers the following day to mark the twenty five years.