Tring Rugby
| Full name | Tring Rugby Club |
|---|---|
| Union | Rugby Football Union |
| Nickname(s) | Mighty Tring |
| Founded | 1963 |
| Ground(s) | Pendley Sports Centre. Cow Lane, Tring, Herts |
| President | Martyn Kirk |
| Coach(es) | Giles Wallis |
| League(s) | London 1 North |
| 2016-17 | Champions (promoted to National League 3 London & SE) |
| Official website | |
| www |
|
Tring Rugby Club is an English rugby union team based in Tring, Hertfordshire. The club runs four senior teams, two academy teams and a full range of junior teams. The first XV currently plays in London 1 North.
Tring Rugby Union Football Club was founded in 1963 by commuters, Arthur Howlett, Donald Dover and local Doctors, Thallon, Adams and Knox, who formed a team from replies to adverts in local newspapers. In September of the same year Arthurs son Stephen Howlett, who attended Tring's Mortimer Hill Secondary School established a junior team. Making history by pioneering the first rugby club in the UK to have a children's youth team mainly formed from the Tring & Berkhamsted schools 1st year football teams and playing at Kingsley Farm set between Manor Road and Meadow Close, Tring (Now known as Kingsley Walk). Playing their first game against Stoke Mandeville with the senior team playing the 1964–65 season having co founder Docter Knox kicking off their first game.
In recent years the club has progressed up the league system, reaching the fifth tier in 2008. The club has played at that level ever since playing in the National 3 South East .
Chief amongst those setting up the club's future was a New Zealander, Mark Ottway, who had been relocated to the UK for business and had settled in Tring. Ottway was the first club captain and had enjoyed rugby at all levels in his native New Zealand, becoming an All Blacks trialist as well as making the country’s Davis Cup tennis squad. Ottway brought tales of life at the rugby clubs in New Zealand where a core part of the club’s set up was based around children playing the game. This was unheard of in England, where rugby at junior level was played only at schools, and primarily fee paying ones at that. Tring liked what Ottway had to say about bringing youth into the club and developing a community feel long before the phrase minis rugby was dreamed up. Members of that first youth and junior team are still active in the club today – a whole rugby career later.
As the town expanded the council compulsorily purchased the original site so it could become Dundale School and, in search of a new home, the club approached another local landowner, the show jumper Dorian Williams who owned the estate at Pendley, on the eastern edge of the town, close to the club's roots at Tring Station. Williams had a philanthropic vision for a cultural centre in Tring that comprised an arts centre, now the popular Court Theatre, an adult education college, which was located in Pendley Manor itself before it became a hotel and a sports centre which would be home to many of the towns sporting teams. Williams welcomed the club with open arms and they established a base alongside Tring Town Football Club (now home to Tring Athletic). By this time fielding two regular teams as well as a growing junior section, moved to the site in the early 1970s and were soon joined by the town’s athletics, hockey, squash and bowls clubs at the burgeoning Cow Lane complex.
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