Adelaide Rams
 |
|
| Club information | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Adelaide Rugby League Football Club |
| Nickname(s) | Rams |
| Founded | 13 December 1995 (first season: 1997) |
| Exited | 1998 |
| Former details | |
| Ground(s) |
|
| CEO |
Tim Pickup (1995–96) Liz Dawson (1996–98) Michael O'Connor (1999) |
| Coach |
Rod Reddy (1995–98) Dean Lance (1998) |
| Captain | Kerrod Walters (1997–98) |
| Competition | Super League and NRL |
|
1997 1998 |
9th of 10 17th of 20 |
| Records | |
| Most capped | 41 - Kerrod Walters |
| Highest points scorer | 116 - Graham Appo |
The Adelaide Rams were an Australian professional rugby league football club based in Adelaide, South Australia. The team was formed in 1995 for the planned rebel Super League competition, which eventually ran parallel to the rival Australian Rugby League (ARL) competition in 1997. The Rams lasted two seasons, the first in the Super League competition in 1997 and the second in the first season of the National Rugby League (NRL) in 1998. The Rams were not a successful club, winning only 13 out of 42 games. However crowd numbers in the first season were the fifth highest of any first-grade club that year, but dwindled to sixteenth in the second season. The Adelaide club was shut down at the end of the 1998 season as a result of poor on-field performances, dwindling crowd numbers, financial losses and a reduction in the number of teams in the NRL. They remain the only team from the state of South Australia to have participated in top-level rugby league in Australia.
The Australian rules football code, with origins as far back as 1843, had long dominated sport in the state. South Australia had two teams competing in the national Australian rules competition, the Australian Football League (AFL): the Adelaide Crows and Port Adelaide Power, the latter starting in the AFL in the same year as the Rams first season in Super League while the Crows won their first two AFL premierships in the same two years the Rams played. The new team from Port Adelaide, who already had a large fan base in the local South Australian National Football League (SANFL) competition, and the Crows successes in 1997–98 made it much harder for the Rams to compete for fan support. They were also competing against the popular Adelaide 36ers who played in the National Basketball League (NBL) which at the time ran a winter season. Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, was considered an Aussie rules stronghold, and in the SANFL had the oldest Aussie Rules Football league, and indeed the oldest league of any code, in Australia, as well as a viable Rugby Union competition which had been running since 1932. The South Australian Rugby League (SARL) also had a First Grade Premiership competition in place since 1976, while league been played competitively in Adelaide since the late 1940s.
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