The club struggled from the word go and and during the two seasons it was in existence only won two games.
Oakwood's fixtures and results can be found in 'A Forgotten Rugby Club'. Follow the link from the tab on the home page for the free download.
Oakwood
played on the old Chirons pitch on Soldiers Field and used the dressing rooms
at Roundhay School. The fixture list was similar to the one that Chirons had
managed to put together the previous season. The Oakwood club played in red and
white hooped shirts, bought with a grant from Leeds City Council. I imagine the
1988/89 season started with a great deal of optimism. Unfortunately, the
initial optimism was short lived and the club struggled from the word go.
There
was only one victory that season on 15th October 1988 against
Airebronians Ex ‘A’. The rest of the season saw defeat after defeat, but the
club was still managing to turn out a team on a fairly regular basis. A tour to
London took place on the weekend on 4th March 1989 when Oakwood
played games against a Wimbledon XV and a Hitchen XV and lost both games. The
players to complete the weekend also watched an England rugby union
International at Twickenham.
Unfortunately, after the tour the season appeared to go rapidly
downhill. The club struggled to get a full team on the pitch for a number of
games in March and April. For the final game of the season against an
Otliensians XV, Oakwood only had thirteen players available and the game was
lost by 72-18.
Despite
the very disappointing first season, the club did arrange a fixture list for
1989/90 and began playing fixtures again in September 1989. However, just after
the season began they got the news that Leeds City Council had ordered them to
leave the dressing rooms at Roundhay School, as they were required for
educational purposes. I can only speculate about why the club was asked to
leave a building that had been used as rugby changing rooms since 1925. Leeds
Chirons and Leeds E.O.S.C. before them had never paid any rent for using the
building. I assume the Education Department had allowed the club to use the
building free of charge because of its education connections. Perhaps it was
because the Oakwood club had no obvious education connection that the City
Council took the opportunity to reclaim the building. However, I can’t imagine
it was ever used for educational purposes, as it had two rugby changing areas,
a bath and a tea room, not really the type of facility required by a school in
1989. A few years later the building was demolished in order to create a car
park. Oakwood continued to fulfil fixtures for the rest of the 1989/90 season
using the Council changing rooms on Soldiers Field but, as was the case in the
previous season, the club only managed one victory, on 4th November
1989, against Wetherby ‘B’, a game won by 26-6. The Oakwood club went out of
existence at the end of the 1989/90 season; the last reported game being away
at Otley Viscounts on 21st April 1990. Oakwood lost that game by 32-6.
It must have been very difficult to keep players motivated at a club that
achieved so few victories. Also the body blow of losing the dressing rooms must
have depressed everyone involved. With such poor facilities and results, the
Oakwood club was never going to attract the type of players who would raise
standards sufficiently for the club to be able to join the Leagues. Possibly
the players involved with Oakwood were happy to play at 3rd and 4th
team level. Once the club really started to struggle for numbers on a Saturday
I imagine that many of the players decided to move to more established local
clubs who could turn full teams out regularly and had their own ground and
clubhouse.
The
Chirons name disappeared in 1988 and after the demise of Oakwood in 1990, rugby
union was no longer played on the pitch that Leeds E.O.S.C. and Chirons had
used for over sixty years.
