THE RFL has now officially announced that Barrow Raiders Ladies have been invited to join the Super League for the 2022 season.

Everyone at the club is delighted with the progress of the team who were just pipped for the Championship title by Leigh.

When the ladies approached us 12 months ago it was with ambition to reach Super League and they felt that the alignment with a professional club would allow them to reach their goals.

The hard work and planning now begins so that we can do ourselves justice. First job is the recruitment of a head coach to replace Si Woodend who is stepping down. Si will be a hard act to follow having proved to be a tremendously popular figure in his time with the team.

We have a vacancy advertised with a closing date of Friday and we have already received some exciting applications.

The new coach will have the remit to develop both the team and individuals and to help with the growth of the female game in the whole of Cumbria. We are Cumbria’s representative in Super League, and we hope to spread our recruitment net over the whole of the county.

Our initial target is that we put together a side that is competitive and able to mix it with the Super League teams. We are perhaps thankful that the leagues have been split in two and we should be playing teams that will not blow us away. Bradford, Leigh, Wakefield, Warrington and Featherstone will be our rivals in a six-team division.

The Challenge Cup is likely to have a round robin format and we could then be pitched some of the big boys like St.Helens and Leeds.

Looking further ahead we have set the target of promotion to Super League 1 by the end of 2023 and to be challenging for top honours in the game by 2025. We want to be creating England internationals from Cumbria and giving them the platform to appear on the biggest stages.

There is little doubt we have been handed a massive opportunity. It is fair to say that if we do this right, we probably have more chance of walking out at Wembley or Old Trafford with the girls than the men given the massive amount of work simply to reach Super League in the men’s game.

My personal ambition is that the team progresses to eventually compete at a semi-professional level but for that the game itself and the team must seek commercial partners to help fund that growth. We have set some ambitious targets for our commercial department to bring in enough finance to self-fund the squad, which includes opportunities for a potential second team to play in a merit league.

It would be fantastic if there was a sponsor out there who could really see the potential for growth in women’s sport and wanted to play a key part in the journey from the start of Super League to the very top of the game. There would be an opportunity for that sponsor to join the board of directors of Barrow Raiders and really influence the direction of the women’s team and game.

I’d love the opportunity to have a conversation with some potential partners. That must be many successful businesses, perhaps with females at the helm, who have turned their operation into a success and is willing to see females in sport and rugby league in particular given the same opportunities and exposure as the men.