Aberdeen Grammar director of rugby Gordon Thomson has backed his club to be back in the Premiership in two years’ time.
Grammar’s relegation from the top flight was confirmed last weekend following the 59-3 defeat at Hawick.
Thomson says the club has been preparing for life in National 1 for a while and has vowed Grammar will bounce back.
He said: “It is not the end of the world and I would expect within a year or two we will be back in the Premiership.
“We’ll blood a lot of younger guys next season and it will be learning curve for them, but ultimately we’re an amateur sports club and it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference which league we play in.
“We have coaches, new players coming through and a strong youth set-up. It’s just the adult section which has not been right this season.
“We’ve had to ride the storm this season due to setbacks which nobody would have foreseen coming, but we have been in similar situations to this in the past and it is all about how we react.”
Grammar have been resigned to their fate for a while
Crippling injuries have not helped the Grammar cause and Thomson has been resigned to the club dropping down a division for a while.
He said: “We’re disappointed to be going down a division, but it was not unexpected.
“There were a number of contributory factors to us being relegated, but we’ve known for weeks, if not months, we were going down.
“It was never going to be possible to come back after (the 42-9 defeat in December at) Jed-Forest. We suffered really bad injuries and were left in an impossible situation.”
A summer of change at Rubislaw
The club has two home games left in their campaign, starting with the visit of Selkirk tomorrow – and Thomson expects changes in the summer.
But the director of rugby is taking a pragmatic view of the club as a whole rather than the short-term pain of relegation.
He also remains confident the future is bright at Rubislaw, despite the setback of relinquishing Premiership status.
Thomason said: “Relegation is not new for us. If you look at the last 20 years of the club, it has been cyclical, but we’ve been in the top two divisions.
“Right now we have an ageing team and it’s likely a few will hang up their boots at the end of the season, but we’ll regroup and bounce back. We’ve had to be realistic and our focus has been on rebuilding.
“We’ve got two games left to finish our season, then we’ll take stock and look at how we plan on coming back up.”