22-05-2025
High praise from Burgess for Warrington Wolves' youth system
AS some of the club's brightest prospects prepare to showcase themselves on a bigger stage, Sam Burgess has praised the work going on in Warrington Wolves' youth development programme.
And he echoed director of rugby Gary Chambers' sentiments that The Wire should now be considered a club that prefers to develop its own talent as opposed to buying it in from elsewhere.
Ahead of Friday's Super League clash with Hull KR at The Halliwell Jones Stadium, The Wire's reserves will face their Rovers counterparts in the curtain-raiser fixture kicking off at 5.15pm.
They will be looking to make it six wins out of six for 2025, with the academy side also holding a perfect record in their competition thus far.
Recent years have seen an increasing flow of young talent breaking into the first team, with two senior debuts being granted this year to half-back Ewan Irwin and centre Zack Gardner.
Both players are set to feature in the Reserves game but for the senior match, the 21-man squad Burgess will pick from contains nine academy graduates.
The aim is for that number to increase but Burgess believes things are heading very strongly in the right direction.
'The pathways have been a huge part of things since Gary took over,' he said.
'We've had a really big emphasis on everything looking the same throughout the club – all of our teams play the same way and our standards are the same.
'Ryan O'Brien (head of youth) leads that department and is doing a fantastic job, but it's been a total buy-in from the bottom up and the top down.
'Everyone's integrated well and we've got some really exciting young players coming through – we've seen a few of them over the last 18 months and we'll see a few more over the next 18.
'For any success, you need a strong pathway and we've put a lot of effort into that.
'As a club, we're not a buying club anymore – we're a developing club. Obviously, every club needs to buy at some point but we want to take more pride in developing our own.
'We've got a lot of our homegrown juniors in the squad and we're trying to create a strong enough programme so that in the next 10, 20, 30 years, that's what Warrington Wolves will look like.
'There's really passionate people at the club like Gary Chambers, Richard Marshall and Ryan O'Brien driving that – I can't take all of the credit.
'I didn't find those players as they had already found them, but now we've put a programme in place to make them ready to step up quicker.
'When they come into first-grade, they look like first-grade players – if you look at players like Jake Thewlis, Arron Lindop, Cai Taylor-Wray, Adam Holroyd, they're ready to go because they've been on our programme.'
