May 3, 2014 5.33 pm This story is over 117 months old

Video: Lincoln rugby club unveils new facilities

Perfect pitches: Lincoln Rugby Club unveiled its new club house and pitches, with enough space for the club to expand.

The Lincoln Rugby Club has officially opened its new club house and pitches, which aim to give the group more space to expand.

Lincoln Rugby Football Club have relocated to a 32 acre site in Nettleham after agreeing a deal with the University of Lincoln.

Sports broadcaster John Inverdale officiated the opening.

With the help of John Roberts Architects, the club now have a purpose-built club house, plus four full size pitches, two junior pitches and five mini pitches, a training area and 140 parking spaces.

There are also six changing rooms, a large bar, and better flood lighting.

The new site means the rugby club can manage all of its 19 teams throughout the week, cater for girls’ and women’s rugby, and host tournaments.

The old location on Longdales Road had led to a number of matches being cancelled due to overuse of the two pitches making them unusable, not enough room for all the teams, sharing with a cricket club and lack of showering facilities, which led to people leaving for other teams.

Peter Small, chairman of the Lincoln Rugby Football Club, said: “We originally had a nine acre site in the middle of Lincoln which we’d simply outgrown.

“So we’d been looking for a new site for about five or six years, but once we got some funding we joined up with the university, who gave us a lease of this land. We then got a bit more money together in order to build the new club house.

“The ground is about four times bigger than that in Lincoln. It’s sad to leave that space after 90 years but we’d simply just outgrown it.

He added: “We’re always looking for new players, we’re desperately trying to get a new ladies team together if any would like to play rugby. Then for those who want to play a bit of rugby but don’t want to take the knocks, we offer touch rugby in the summer.

“We’ll be looking at starting a rugby league team coming to play on the park during the summer too — the possibilities now are endless.”