Skolars taking steep route up learning curve

London club face tough initiation into professional ranks with Cup tie against Dewsbury

They might get heartily sick of the educational imagery before long, but the learning process begins for the London Skolars this weekend.

Rugby League's newest professional club plays its first competitive match at home to Dewsbury – with a mere 108 years of heritage behind them and on the brink of Super League two years ago – in the Arriva Trains Cup on Sunday. They must hope that their brave venture does not come off the rails at the first bend.

The Skolars are an unusual rugby league club in every respect. Founded seven years ago by London-based graduates who had enjoyed the game at university and wanted to carry on, they have grown into an organisation which now feels it can take on the hardened professionals from the north. Their co-founder, Hector McNeil, admits that the initial test has come a little earlier than they had visualised.

"We didn't expect to be playing as soon as this and we didn't expect to be playing teams like Dewsbury from National League One," McNeil says. "We are treating this like our pre-season. We know we have taken on a lot, but we will be ready for it by the start of the league season."

McNeil and the Skolars' head coach, Mark Croston, are part of a new breed which is expanding rugby league's horizons. McNeil is "something in the City" and spends part of each week in Dublin; Croston devotes a couple of days every week to running cultural services in the London Borough of Sutton. Your traditional butchers, bakers and candlestick makers they are not.

They have still found time to turn the Skolars – the odd spelling is the result of a lager sponsorship that ultimately fell flat – into a successful amateur side. Preparing them to compete against professionals is a different matter entirely.

"We made a decision that we weren't going to bring anybody down to London and get into the business of providing houses and cars," says Croston. "There are enough people who are here for other reasons."

Those include Paul Koloi, flagged up as "the new Tuigamala" when he played briefly for Wigan; various other Antipodeans; a South African international in Rupert Jonkers; and Northerners like Pat Rich and Steve Walker brought to the big city by their careers.

"We've even had a Chilean at training," says McNeil. "The days when London meant the Bow Bells are long gone."

Nobody will greatly subsidise the cost of living in the capital by playing for the Skolars. There is no contract money, just modest winning and losing pay.

"But we're in a different position from most clubs," says McNeil. "Seventy-five per cent of our players are graduates with good jobs. On average, they'll be earning about £50,000 – so they won't be playing for the Skolars for the money."

The club is built upon a commitment to the code among people who, a few years back, would have gravitated elsewhere.

"The easy thing for us to have done would have been to set up a rugby union club, because there is a gap in London for that, but this is what we wanted to do," McNeil says. "We feel there is a real opportunity for this club, if we can get the business structure right."

The Skolars are almost up to the modest 100 season tickets they have budgeted for in their equally modest break-even crowd of 250 at the New River Stadium in Harringay. Where they expect to have the edge over other clubs is in the help they will get from other companies under the umbrella of the same holding company.

Among their more ambitious plans are for a string of "mini-leagues clubs" – amusement arcades by another name – which would pump money into the rugby club.

Croston, unlike McNeil from a league background in Ince, near Wigan, knows that to make all this work it still needs the Skolars to be competitive on the field.

That, despite good performances against heartland teams in the past, is the tricky part. "We might get a few thrashings, but there's the strength of character in the squad to come through that and carry on improving through the season," says Croston.

"We've signed 20 new players and, even if Wigan did that, they wouldn't start winning games straight away."

The club captain, Chris Thair, is under similarly few illusions about the extent of the task. "But I can't wait to get at them," he says. "Everyone's unsure of what to expect at the moment, but other clubs don't know what to expect from us either.

"We're not the biggest of sides, but we're very comfortable together as a squad. It could sometimes be a case of us getting beaten heavily, but we'll always still put up a good fight."