Late last month, Sydney Rugby Union president David Begg announced that Penrith would be removed from the Shute Shield competition immediately.

We caught up with Begg to find out more about the decision and find out what the SRU has planned for rugby in Western Sydney.

Can you tell us about your decision to remove Penrith from the Shute Shield competition for the time being? 

It is for the time being, as you said. Like every club, we review entry into the Shute Shield before every season and the view was taken last year that Penrith needed to be regularly monitored. We created a criteria that they needed to meet to take part in the Shute Shield competition and we monitored that in the opening weeks. Unfortunately, they didn’t meet that and we felt that the integrity of the competition would be compromised if they remained in the competition.

Why wasn’t the decision made either before the start of the season of at the end of the season? 

We wanted to give Penrith sufficient time to satisfy the criteria and as a number of the criteria related to game day activities, we couldn’t review that until the season started. We felt that the integrity of the competition was being undermined by a number of things happening at Penrith and that they weren’t up to the standards of the other 11 Shute Shield clubs.

Does there need to be a Shute Shield club in Western Sydney? 

Absolutely there does, but I don’t know whether it needs to be in Penrith. You referenced Western Sydney in the question and I absolutely think we need to have a club somewhere in that region.

Are there plans in place for a new club in Western Sydney?

There are and we’re talking to all the key stakeholders at the moment to make sure a plan is quickly created which has buy in from all the stakeholders to work out what the new footprint in Western Sydney might look like.

What areas are you looking at? 

I’m not in a position to answer that just yet. One of the first things we’ve looked into is a demographic study into what Western Sydney might look like in 10 and 20 years. I think that was one of the problems back in 1995. Penrith were just asked to produce a successful rugby club in the off season and really for 23 years, they’ve been treading water at best.

We’d prefer to take our time and follow trends as to where the communities are going and find an area with strong demographics to build a club around.

How important is it to work with local government and the new infrastructure being built in the region? 

In my view, that is the most important thing. For example, we might want to look somewhere around where the new airport is being built. Obviously, a massive community is going to be built around that area with plenty of government infrastructure so it may be easier to lobby the government to build a new sporting complex there because of the massive community that will grow around the new airport.

How long do you think this will take?

I think the worst thing we can do is to try and put Penrith 2.0 back in the Shute Shield in 2019 and have them being belted every week. That doesn’t work on any level. We need to put Western Sydney 2.0, whatever that might look like, back in the competition when they are ready to be competitive and to match the standards of our other clubs.

What can rugby learn from the success of some of the rugby league clubs in Western Sydney? 

You’ve got to be genuinely engaged with your community, you’ve got to be genuinely engaged with all elements of government, you’ve got to have a strong sponsorship base and your club can not be driven by any one ethnicity or demography, it needs to include a range of ethnicities to be a successful sporting franchise.

What role do NSW Rugby and Rugby Australia have to play in all of this? 

They are the keys. The Sydney Rugby Union has a dollar in, dollar out budget. We’re there to run the Shute Shield competition. We need a holistic approach that takes into account all the elements of Western Sydney but it’s fair to say, there are some major problems that need to be addressed.

We know that Parramatta and West Harbour aren’t playing third grade colts this year and that worries us enormously. While both clubs are competitive in most grades, we’re concerned that some of the junior numbers are starting to dry up in Western Sydney. This plan needs to try and reengage the entire region and what we absolutely need to do is make sure rugby is a game played in public schools again and public schools in Western Sydney.

How do we do that?

We need to work out the best entry level for each specific school and then invest some time and capital. For example, there may be schools where Viva 7s is the right entry point, there may be schools where preseason 10s is the right entry point, for others it might be a schools XVs competition.

20 years ago when Penrith was run under a different administration, they actually had a local schools competition. They paid the coaches but it wasn’t overly expensive and Penrith got direct access to a great number of future colts players. I think whatever plan we come up with for Western Sydney, we must invest some capital in schools so that we can show the kids what a great game rugby is.

In 10 years time, what do you think the rugby landscape in Western Sydney will look like? 

It will be different to how it looks now because Western Sydney will be different. We need to follow demographic shifts so that the rugby club is part of the community and if your community changes, you need to find out a way to evolve.

The best example of that is Eastwood, who are moving because they’ve got an opportunity to do so and make some money out of it but more so because there has been major demographic changes in their community. We need to factor in those trends, find out where we think the strongest rugby playing base is and work with local and state government to build a rugby centre of excellence.

In 10 years time, I hope we’ve got a strong Western Sydney footprint in a vibrant Shute Shield competition.

Can that club be successful? 

It’s going to require all the stakeholders to make a commitment to make that happen. It’s not going to be easy, because all of our other clubs continue to improve as well. But the only point of doing all this is to make it successful. We’re not just doing it to tick a box and say we’ve got a club in the region, we’re doing it because we want rugby to be strong in all areas of Sydney and NSW. We want rugby to be peoples sport of choice.