This is the story of a club… Again? There are more than 1,900 of them in France. Well, yes. This is the story of a club that matters just as much as those fighting not to die, as much as those struggling to survive, as much as those battling to grow. Come on then. Off we go to the Côtes d’Armor.

From 1994 to today: the RKT’s farming heritage

Eric Dézé, 54, chairman of the RKT and a bank adviser specialising in the farming world, looks back on the creation of Rugby Kreiz Treger, Côtes d’Armor, 32 years ago: “1994, the founding of the club. There is one central figure, Philippe Corson, the father of Lénaïg (great France lock, 35 caps, sevens player, ambassador for women’s rugby and not only, editor’s note), now retired from his job as a PE teacher and rugby missionary in the region.”

He worked at the Pommerit agricultural college, 800 pupils, from the fourth form of secondary school up to the BTS. A big boarding school, pupils coming from all over Brittany and even further afield. There was a talent pool, and that is why Philippe, a rugby fanatic, set up rugby at the college. What happened next? Four BTS students got their end-of-course project signed off: creating a… rugby club! Agricultural, as we said. That was in 92, and two years later the project came to life and the club became the fifth in the history of the Côtes d’Armor. Philippe was the first chairman.

And Eric? “I arrived at the club in 2001, there had already been an attempt to create a rugby school, which never came off. We started again, with a few kids. Since then we have had about fifty of them at the rugby school.” Surprising or not, the links with the agricultural college are as strong as ever, a very strong rural, farming identity, plenty of farmers whether as players or as parents of the rugby school children; it remains the fabric, the historic bond.

The numbers challenge: « It would take almost nothing… »

That is the club’s DNA, and that of rugby in Brittany too. 100 registered members, half of them at the rugby school, girls, U6s, mini-poussins, poussins, benjamins, minimes… But it is not simple being in inter-club arrangements, playing in a combined side. It is as beautiful as a Serge Reggiani song: “It would take almost nothing…”, perhaps thirty more members to have a respectable presence in every age group. That is the challenge for this club, which is more than local yet confined to Le Vieux-Marché alone, the village with the only training and match pitch, more worn out than its very dynamic officials!

This weekend the “first team” are playing for survival in Régionale 1, in the derby, at home to Lannion. Not simple with a pool of barely thirty players up against sides relegated from Fédérale 3 and clubs with promotion plans.

Gaétan Le Pennec: the “Chabal” of the Côtes d’Armor

Fortunately, there is Chabal. Not the famous bearded one, no, one of the club’s emblematic players who may well retire either after this match or at the end of the season: Gaétan Le Pennec. Milking his many cows from 5am, a wrecked back, and not on the wing, no, he plays up front, anywhere from 2 to 6!

“I remember trying to give him mobility exercises,” smiles Lénaïg Corson. But the menhir is not renowned for his suppleness. The chairman adds: “Sometimes he cannot get his boots off, his ankles swollen, you almost have to cut them open. He has a lot of cows, so he has taken over a big farm. He will have no choice but to stop.”

Vannes on the horizon and local development

Development plans for the RKT? Projects? The chairman: “We work very well with everyone, whether it is the CTC, the CD, the CD22’s employee or the league. It goes very well. They lend us a hand, whether in the schools or with communication.” Development is the key word: managing to increase numbers, getting known, running events, getting into the schools of the canton and the holiday clubs, so as to recruit and then try to keep the kids.

There is also a hope that Vannes will become the standard-bearer of Breton rugby, well supported by the REC. Last August the RCV beat Stade Toulousain at the Roudourou in Guingamp, Côtes d’Armor. A wonderful memory for the RKT chairman: “Living in Guingamp myself, when I got the news I thought it was fake news, it cannot be true! We had been trying for decades to get a match there. We were hosted by Vannes, by Toulouse, and above all we got to talk, to go to the Roudourou, it was a feat. Hats off.”

The missionaries of the Côtes d’Armor send their best. By the way, to grasp the stubborn character of the Bretons: among their souvenir trinkets you will find bags full of granite chips labelled “menhir chippings” with the following instructions: “sow in your garden, let the fine Breton rain do its work, wait a few millennia and harvest your menhirs”.