National Conference League

While in the early days rugby league had an established structure outside of the professional leagues with county-wide competitions and the like, this soon decayed into local district leagues usually only featuring teams from one or two towns with no input from the professional game. This eventually saw the number of amateur rugby league clubs reduce to a mere 150 in the early 1970s.

Against this background British Amateur Rugby League Association were formed in 1973. One of their first acts was to merge the vast majority of the district leagues into three regional leagues: the Yorkshire League, the Pennine League and the North Western Counties League. For geographical reasons the Hull League, the Cumberland League, the Barrow League and the London League were left as they were.

This allowed clubs to play at more appropriate standards as there were more divisions, and this factor along with the improved governance of BARLA saw the standard and numbers of clubs rise quickly. However, while there was a National Cup, the best amateur clubs were still divided between six leagues and thus the desire for an amateur National League arose.

The BARLA National League was formed in 1986. The league received twenty-seven applications including five from the Barrow area alone, and more unusually, one from a London club- South London Warriors.

In the end the league settled on ten members, all from the northern strongholds of the game. These were four clubs from Yorkshire: Dudley Hill, Milford Marlins, Heworth and West Hull; four clubs from Lancashire: Pilkington Recs, Wigan St Patrick's, Woolston Rovers and Leigh Miners' Welfare; and two clubs from Cumbria: Egremont Rangers and Millom. These ten clubs were to be the members for each of the first three seasons.

The National League soon proved popular and for the 1989/90 season extended the top flight to twelve teams to include Lock Lane and Mayfield. However, this modest expansion wasn't enough and the 1989/90 season also saw the addition of a 10-team second division (to expand to 12 teams after one season).

The ten inaugural members of the second division were as follows: Saddleworth Rangers, Leigh East, British Aerospace, Barrow Island, Askam, Knottingley, Redhill, Dewsbury Celtic, Shaw Cross Sharks and East Leeds. This expansion was to prove successful with Leigh East becoming the first non-founder members to win the league in the 1990/91 season.

In 1993 the RFL wanted to contract the professional ranks from 35 to 32 teams. However, their initial plan to place the excluded teams in the Alliance (reserve grade) faced a legal challenge so they needed an alternative competition to place them in. The RFL thus proposed a league to bridge the gap between the professional and amateur leagues to feature the three demoted semi-pro clubs plus Hemel Hempstead (who already played in the Alliance as a semi-pro club) and eight BARLA clubs.

However, BARLA wanted all National League clubs to be in any such league and since the RFL were in a tough legal position they were prepared to compromise with BARLA and thus the three division National Conference League was born. Other concessions made were an increase in the BARLA representation in the Challenge Cup from a mere 2 clubs to 64 and allowing the National Conference League champions to apply to replace the bottom team in the pro leagues.

However, the latter concession soon disappeared as the pro leagues moved to summer and the National Conference League did not want to move, furthermore Woolston Rovers' application to replace Highfield was voted out (the one club elected to the league from the National Conference League being Chorley Borough who were themselves a former semi-pro league club). The National Conference League soon expanded all divisions to 14 teams, though on occasions it has struggled to reach full complement of members, and lost all the remaining semi-pro clubs within three seasons.

Due to the switch of the pro game to summer the National Conference League gradually came to be seen as solely a BARLA league, despite being temporarily expelled from BARLA in 2002, with only three National Conference League teams joining National League Three which was intended as a league to bridge the gap between the pro and amateur games. However, this was to change in 2008 when the National Conference League decided they did not like the path BARLA was taking and downgraded the league's BARLA membership from full to associate. In 2009 the National Conference League introduced a summer competition for clubs wanting to play year round as a test for a more permanent switch to summer which was to come in 2012.

From 2012 the Conference played in summer, as tier 3 of the new pyramid, and the initial season saw two former Rugby League Conference National Division clubs admitted (Dewsbury Celtic and Featherstone Lions) with others expected to join from 2013. For one season only the Rugby League Conference National Division ran as Conference division three with no automatic promotion to division two, but after this, all northern clubs were required to meet full Conference criteria to play in tier 3. The RFL also had ambitions of a Conference South which would leave the former National Conference League as Conference North. From 2013, the limit on member clubs was raised from 42 to 56 and saw an increase to four divisions.