SWINDON College Old Boys are preparing for life in Southern Counties North after returning at the first time of asking.

Mark Lea’s side have enjoyed a successful season, which has seen them only lose two games to league-winners Reading Abbey, as they finished as runners-up, as well as making it to the South West Senior Vase Regional Final, falling two games shy of a place at Twickenham.

However, next term will be a difficult prospect as they step up a level to the same league that Wootton Bassett ply their trade and director of rugby Martin Lloyd is confident that the squad is good enough to compete and do better than the one win they managed the last time they played at that tier.

“It has been a phenomenal season for us and everyone has bought into what we wanted to do,” said Lloyd.

“We picked up quite a few serious injuries to start with but the quality of the squad has gone from strength to strength.

“The season before this one, the boys struggled and the boys won one game.

“It was only through hard work this season that we have shown that we can do well.

“The belief is that we are going to be fairly structured in the games that we will target and we will work really hard and leave nothing to chance.

“There is enough talent in the squad to live at the higher level and do well.

“One of the things we need to be careful of is becoming despondent if a couple of results don’t go our way.

“If you set your sights just on that Southern Counties league, then that is the only place you will stay. We set our sights higher than that. The club is ambitious and we want to do well.”

College, who are hoping to move to a new home in Wichelstowe in the next two years, rounded off their campaign with a 28-13 victory over Chipping Norton and Lloyd was glad that the team could put in a professional display in what was an odd end-of-the-season run-in.

“It has been quite funny because quite a few weeks ago, we knew that even if we lost every single game, we would still finish in second place and we knew we weren’t going to finish in first,” he added.

“We wanted to make sure that we wanted to finish the season in a positive light.”