Rammo’s Blog

Ramsden

“That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”!…Ben Dents comments after completing Chris Thormans’ cross fit workout last night in GLL gym. Chris was delighted by this comment, but he knew it was tough having done it himself in what ended up the best time of the night. With the poor weather conditions, the squad was broken into four groups, two training in the gyms at Hull and Gateshead and the other two together at York. The 20-25 minute workout involved five rounds of rowing and `bastardos’ which is an exercise incorporating press ups, squat thrusts, cleans and overhead presses with 15kg dumbells. As the rowing distance reduces, the reps on the bastardos increases and it gets really tough. Good times were achieved by Joe Hemmings, Ben Dent and Ed Smith, and they were all fairly close to Chris’ time of just over 20 minutes.

We have two new players joining us this week on dual-registration deals from Hull FC, Chris Green and Laurence Pearce, and having watched their clips and reading up about them we are looking forward to working with
them. Chris is the more established of the two in terms of rugby league development, and he is in Hulls squad this week for their trip to Catalans. Laurence, however, is relatively new to league having previously played rugby union but his stature and athleticism is very impressive. He’s well over six foot and one clip showed him going the
length of the field and no one got near him! There were some signs that he already possesses a good skill level too, with some quality passing and offloads.

The 10 year Knights souvenir brochure was a good read yesterday and brought all those memories back. One thing I had forgotten was that Stuart `Corgi’ Horton stepped in to coach us during the last few weeks of the York Wasps existence. It was a traumatic time for everyone but the way the Knights rose from the ashes was an incredible effort by
everyone and all those people should be proud of what they created.

The weather is not looking good (on Friday) and there are serious doubts over this weeks game. We’ve provisionally booked Burnholme School on Saturday afternoon in case it is cancelled and we’ve organised a session which will incorporate some conditioning and a few different games in the sports hall. I’d like to thank Paul Winterburn at Burnholme, and also GLL for their help with our training this week at very short notice.

So the first game is likely to be Doncaster away, which will be a tough one to start with. One thing to deal with will be the fact that we haven’t played away from home yet this year (in the pre-season friendlies), and the Keepmoat Stadium is a wider field than ours, so we will be adjusting the training area on the field next week to enable us to practice with additional width. The lads are raring to go after this weeks set back due to the weather and it’s going to be a hard job to pick the team. Difficult decisions will have to be made, but it’s a nice position to be in, and at least the players carrying injuries will have another week to fully recover.

Cheers

Rammo