THE Boggabri Roos will be looking to sharpen their skills ahead of the 2019 Group 4 season with a trial match against the South West Robins in Boggabri from 3pm on Saturday.
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The trial will mark the first time the club's reserve grade side will take the field and will also see the ladies league tag team play off with the Robins.
Saturday's trial match will be the Roos' second of the pre-season after a recent clash with Warialda.
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Roos coach Shane Rampling told the Leader he was looking forward to seeing "some fresh faces have a run".
"We did play a trial match against Warialda recently, but not all of our guys were available for that one," Rampling said.
"So we should have a couple of guys who missed that trial match running out on Saturday, which should be good."
While not keeping score, Rampling believes Warialda got the better of his side in their trial match.
"We took a pretty young side up there and the boys did pretty well," he said.
"For us, the score wasn't too important, getting a good run in was what mattered and I think we did that."
The Roos have had a successful off-season by attracting several new players to the club and appointing Dave Harris as the coach of the inaugural reserve-grade team.
"At the end of last season, our goal for 2019 was to have 50 players on the list and I think we are just about there," Rampling said.
"After our trial against Warialda we had a few more guys commit to the season and hopefully we will have a few more in the coming weeks as well.
"Our under-18 team probably still needs another six or seven players, so if there are young guys out there keen on a run they are more than welcome."
With Boggabri beginning its regular season campaign on May 4 against Narrabri, Rampling said the focus for Saturday's trial match would be fitness.
"It was an area we identified as needing work and hopefully we can be better fitness wise than we were last year," he said.
"We have been working on it a lot over the off-season and I really think we have come a long way.
"At this stage we have a full-club trial match scheduled against Narrabri on April 13 and that will be good to help keep the fitness up.
"Given we are playing them in round one, it should be a really good yard stick for us to get on idea on where we are at."
- The trial matches will begin with ladies league tag at 3pm followed by reserve-grade at 4pm.