Fifteen of the country’s leading club sevens teams will be out to prevent a three-peat from the host side Eden RFC at this weekend’s National Club Seven tournament at Auckland. The Middlesex County Wavell Cup. Last year Eden became the first club since Dunedin’s Alhambra-Union to successfully defend the Middlesex County Wavell Wakefield Cup when the beat hot-shot Hawke’s Bay outfit Napier Old Boys Marist 24-14 in the wet in the Cup final at their Sandringham enclave...More

Above: The Wellington rugby team 1919, Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library.  30 August 1919 was a watershed date in New Zealand provincial rugby. For the first time since September 1914, the Ranfurly Shield was put on the line. Introduced in 1904, the Ranfurly Shield had grown to be the pre-eminent prize in the domestic game, but with the outbreak of war in September 2014 it had been locked away for five years. Starting with the first defence against Canterbury on the last Saturday of August 1919, Wellington would successfully defend the Ranfurly Shield on five occasions and take it with them to defend on the road for the first time (which they would do again in 1920)...More

The Senior Championship club rugby competition 100 years ago was every bit as thrilling as it is today. Crowds of up to several thousand regularly watched club matches at Athletic Park and further afield at venues such as Duppa St Park (now the site of a WCC plant nursery and a bowling club) and the Petone Rec and there were several star players to follow such as Poneke captain Beet Algar, Athletic and Wellington representative captain Edward ‘Teddy’ Roberts and Petone’s Matt Corner...More

Photo above: Soon to be selected All Black, Neven McEwan in 1955, left, with Australian sporting great, Ken McGregor. A MOST VALUABLE MEANS OF CIVILISING YOUNG MEN “The Wadestown Club” On 10 February 1910, the then Mayor of Wellington, Dr Alfred Kingcome Newman, remarked when opening the new Wadestown clubrooms on Pitt Street that, “a club in suburban life was one of the most valuable means of civilising young men.” The Club (originally formed in 1895) had a membership of between 40 and 50 with Charles Joplin, the Headmaster of Wadestown School, its elected President...More

The anticipation for the coming rugby season is growing by the day. The summer of rugby ramps up in the lower North Island over the next several weeks, including several sevens tournaments, pre-season club rugby and the opening salvos of the Super Rugby season for the elite players. The Hurricanes region’s club competitions stoke up over the back half of March. The Wellington Swindale Shield competition kicks off on Saturday 23 March. Saturday 2 February promises to be a bumper day on the rugby fields just north of Wellington...More

Club Rugby has made some website changes. Much of the existing website, such as the Draws & Results, Profiles, Photos and our story archives going back to 2005 (the links across the top of this page), remains untouched, but a new home page and a new template for current stories has been implemented. This is to start modernising the website and to make it easier to read and navigate for the majority of the audience who are on mobile devices, while also providing better value for our current and future partners and supporters...More

Above: Poneke's Ben Huntley tussles with Ories' Paulo Aukuso in 2009. In recent years Premier rugby has increasingly become a young man’s game, with more players making the jump from their school first XVs to the cauldron of club rugby in the space of one or two seasons and fewer players staying in the game for longer. Heading into the start of the new season, we take a look at the Club Rugby ‘survivors’ team of 2018 – the longest-serving players that laced up the boots and played Premier Rugby last season...More

The festive season is a time for family and friends, for relaxing and making merry. But soon enough, the attention will turn to the 2019 rugby season. See below for this year’s 12 rugby questions of Christmas heading into another bumper year of local, domestic and international rugby. 1. Are Wainuiomata too old? With nearly a dozen players in their squad from last year with over 100 Premier games, Wainuiomata aren’t short of experience, but is this preventing youngsters (if they exist) from being promoted...More

This weekend’s National Sevens will feature 16 provincial unions who qualified at the Northern, Central and Southern Regional Qualifiers held at the start of December. Sixteen men’s and 12 women’s teams will vie for top honours at the Tauranga Domain. In the men’s division, Tasman, Wellington and Counties Manukau topped their respective qualifying events, with defending champions Waikato finishing second in their Northern Region tournament. South Canterbury and Wairarapa Bush join the 14 NPC Unions to round out the 2018 men's competitors...More

Over three-quarters of clubs (77%) report receiving no direct funding from any governing body, despite most (90%) having to pay affiliation fees or levies, according to the results of a recent survey of Sports Clubs undertaken by the New Zealand Amateur Sport Association Inc., in partnership with the Auckland University of Technology. With nearly two-thirds (62%) of clubs either “losing money” or “approximately breaking-even”, only one-half of clubs (53%) reported having a Strategic Plan, (with nearly half of all clubs (43%) having no financial sponsor), suggesting that balancing the Love of the Game with the financial challenges of maintaining a vibrant community presence is a key focus...More