Behind the scenes with West Wales Raiders Manager Peter Tiffin

With so much going on at the club at the minute the beginning of the week continued as myself and Andrew Thorne found out that we had been appointed as Team Manager and Assistant Coach for Wales under 16s this season. Both of us were really happy to receive more positive news, it means more work
outside of the club but will benefit us in the future as we will work with and against some of the up and coming coaches from Wales and England.

As the week progressed so did the meetings, each meeting this week saw us discussing future links which could help the club improve their pathway for the future development of players.

One of our meetings saw us finalise a future link with Swansea University Warpigs. The Warpigs, Swansea University RL have recently been promoted to Premier South for the 2015/16 season and it was a no brainer for the Raiders to meet up with the university staff and see how both clubs could work together. After a positive meeting between both the club and university team, future links have now been created, with the West Wales Raiders coming on board to help with matters both on and off the pitch,Ben Lewis Head coach of Swansea University Rugby League commented,” I feel that this new link between both teams cannot only benefit Swansea Uni RL but also Wales RL as a whole. It’ll be good to utilise the benefits from
the amount of resources which the Raiders have and they will hopefully enhance the name of the Warpigs in west Wales.”

Another club partnership that we managed to secure this week was with Cardiff City Rugby League, we shall work together with Cardiff to benefit developing rugby league in South Wales. The partnership will begin with the launch of school holiday skills camps for juniors aged 11-16 in Cardiff this Easter.

During the week we had our first ever “Keep Fit with the Raiders”, session, this was a trial day to see how well it would go, we were working closely with Carmarthenshire’s community first, spice time credits and
Trimsaran Leisure centre, keep an eye out for another event very soon.

This weekend myself Andrew Thorne and Jon Ellis look forward to travelling to Hull for the weekend to see how Hull Kingston Rovers operates and what practices can be duplicated in west Wales. We will also meet up with super league legend Jamie Peacock who now works for Hull KR, he has invited us to watch Hull KR take on Castleford tigers in their first super league game of the season.