Co-president of Valence Romans, Laurent Beaugiraud looks back on the season that has just passed. He also tells us about the ambitions he has for his club. Interview for Rugby Magazine and Le Quotidien Du Sport.
Are you satisfied with your team?
Yes. As promoted, we were clearly playing to maintain. This is the first time we’ve held our ground, the other times we went back down. We finished 11th, for us it was a superb performance in an extremely complicated and very demanding championship. We narrowly lost away matches, it’s a shame, but we took the defensive bonus from big teams, Aurillac, Dax, Mont-de-Marsan. There were 50% of the squad new, we had changed the manager. We are happy that our choices were validated because with all these changes we were heading off into the unknown.
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What made the difference compared to your other climbs which ended with descents?
Learning, we knew what awaited us, the difficulty of the matches. We built a coherent squad, targeting players who would become managers. They did not disappoint us. And above all we played to win. We offered a game.
What are your goals for next season?
We will already try to beat our record of away victories which is one (23-14 in Colomiers on the last day, Editor’s note) (laughs). We want to keep our fundamentals, be involved, the content of the matches is good, we have to keep this state of mind. The goal is also to establish ourselves in this championship which has big teams who have made significant recruitments, we want to benchmark ourselves against them. And above all not to have regrets at the end of the season.
“We need to train young players for the first team”
And in the longer term?
We launched the Damiers 2029 plan over five years. This is the third development plan. By 2029, we aim to move up, to be in the Top 6 and therefore to play in the final phases, improve the infrastructure, the coaching, the level of play, and also develop our training system.
We need to train young players for the first team, the potential of young players being significant, we need to make them want to join us. We also want to build other lounges for receptionists on match days and to have more partners and a larger bodega to generate more money.
