Pearce remains positive ahead of new proposed season

Hull RUFC director of rugby Gary Pearce remains optimistic that a new season can get under way as planned in September.

Rugby, like many sports, took time out as the world came to terms with dealing with Covid-19. But there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel as restrictions continue to be eased.

Pearce and the rest of the coaches began training in recent weeks and they have penciled in June 1 as the official start to pre-season.

Pearce hopes the game returns to some sense of normality sooner rather than later.

“We hope a normal season can prevail,but we’re not there yet,” Pearce said.

“Because of restrictions, we’ve not trained much since November but we began training two weeks ago, once a week. We don’t want to do too much at this stage.

“We are aiming to start pre-season training on June 1 and we have a few things in the pipeline. We intend to enter the Scarborough 10’s in August and use that as part of our preparations for the new season.

“We are not able to do any contact training, so we will be keeping a close eye out on when that changes so we can step up training accordingly.

“In terms of pre-season friendlies, we are looking at playing four, which is more than we would normally have, but we feel it is the right thing to do to get us ready for the start of the season.”