North Berwick withdraw from National League Four

02/28/2025 01:06 PM

NORTH BERWICK have become the latest rugby club to withdraw from Scottish Rugby’s league structure due to lack of players. The East Lothian outfit have struggled all season, suffering a number of crushing defeats, and were well adrift at the bottom of the National League Four table on -8 points due to multiple points-deduction sanctions for failing to raise a team.

The club was due to play Greenock Wanderers away this weekend, and posted a plea for player volunteers on social media on Tuesday, before making the decision today that was time to call it quits for this season with five matches still to go, so as to provide other teams in the league with some clarity as to how the remainder of their campaign looks.

North Berwick – the hometown club of current Scotland co-captain Rory Darge – were promoted into National Four ahead of the 2023-24 season, and initially settled well, finishing fifth out of 10 teams with a record of 10 wins and eight losses in their first year at that level. However, as has been the case with other teams who have taken the step up from the regional to the national leagues, the second season proved to be far more challenging in terms of raising teams for regular road trips of several hours.

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“A large number of our team consists of people who have moved into or back to the town to bring up their families so persuading them to be away all day Saturday eight or nine times per season is really hard,” explained club President Ken Muir. “Out closest away match this season was Linlithgow [just under 100 miles round trip], but we were also up to Elgin and Forfar to the north, and had a lot of games through in the west against Ardrossan, Whitecraigs and Greenock, who we are really sorry to let down this weekend because they had a big lunch organised … unfortunately, we’d just reached the end of the road.

“We’ve had a lot of help from other clubs like Ross High, Preston Lodge, Musselburgh, Lasswade and Selkirk giving us players who just want to play rugby, but the league rules state that you can’t loan players during the final five weeks of the season and that just left us in a spot where we had to make a decision which we didn’t take lightly but we knew was the right thing to do.”

While North Berwick’s fate next season is still to be decided by the SRU Championship Committee, the likely (and sensible) outcome will be that they are placed back in East One next season.

“That’s where we want to play, and if we are in that league then we are confident that we can have the numbers to be competitive every week,” added Muir. “We’ve got a good youth section at the club, with about 20 players coming out of the under-18s this season, and while a lot will go off traveling or to university, some will still be around to add to our player base.

“We won’t be asking guys to give up their whole Saturday and we can get back to enjoying the game, and not battling to scrape together a team every week.”

Three teams are set to be relegated from National Four into the regional leagues at the end of this season, with Greenock Wanderers, Hamilton Bulls, Stewartry and perhaps Whitecraigs now fighting it out to escape the two remaining demotion spots.

A Scottish Rugby statement said: “North Berwick advised Scottish Rugby they are unable to fulfil their remaining National 4 fixtures and have withdrawn from the league with immediate effect. While it is saddening to see a club in this position, Scottish Rugby recognises the club is proactively protecting the integrity of the league and the competition.

“Scottish Rugby is now in the process of recalculating the remaining fixtures, based on a full programme of home and away matches by the remaining teams, as per National Competition Rules.”

North Berwick are not alone in finding themselves reluctantly having to take this extreme step. Carnoustie HSFP announced that its men's 1st XV had been forced to withdraw from Caledonia Regional League One ahead of the season kicking off in August, Kinloss Eagles withdrew from Caledonia Region League Division One [North Division] in September due to low player numbers. and Gala YM withdrew from East League Three in December.

Those are just some of the most notable examples of grassroots clubs buckling under the strain of low player numbers. In a column on this website on 17th December, Dom Ward discussed the number of men’s club matches being called off due to personnel shortages, reporting that 224 games had fallen by the wayside in the first for months of the season.

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