Oakwood played on the old Leeds Chirons pitch on Soldiers Field, in Roundhay, and used the changing rooms in the grounds of Roundhay School. The fixture list for the 1988/89 season was similar to the one that Chirons had managed to put together the previous season. The Oakwood club played in red and white hooped shirts, bought with a grant from Leeds City Council. I imagine that first season started with a great deal of optimism. Unfortunately, the initial optimism was short lived and the club struggled to become established.
There was only one victory that first season and that came on the 15th of October 1988 against Airebronians Ex ‘A’. The rest of the season saw defeat after defeat, but despite the defeats the club was still managing to turn out a team on a fairly regular basis. A tour to London took place on the weekend of the 4/5th of March 1989 when Oakwood played games against a Wimbledon XV and a Hitchen XV, they lost both games. To complete the weekend the players also watched an England rugby union International at Twickenham. Unfortunately, after the tour the season appeared to go rapidly downhill. The club struggled to get a full team on the pitch for a number of games in March and April. For the final game of the season against an Otliensians XV, Oakwood only had thirteen players available and lost the game 72-18.
Despite the very disappointing first season, the club did arrange a fixture list for the 1989/90 season and began playing fixtures again in September 1989. However, just after the season began they got the news that Leeds City Council had ordered them to leave the dressing rooms at Roundhay School as they were required for educational purposes. I can only speculate about why the club was asked to leave a building that had been used as rugby changing rooms since 1925. Leeds Chirons and Leeds Education Offices Sports Club before them had never paid any rent for using the building. I assume Leeds City Council's Education Department had allowed the clubs to use the building free of charge because both clubs had connections to education. Perhaps it was because the Oakwood club had no obvious education connection that the City Council took the opportunity to reclaim the building. However, I can’t imagine it was ever used for educational purposes, as it had two changing areas, a bath and a tea room, not really the type of facility required by a school in 1989. A few years after Oakwood stopped using the building it was demolished in order to create a car park. Oakwood continued to fulfil fixtures for the rest of the 1989/90 season using the Council changing rooms on Soldiers Field, but as was the case in the previous season, the club only managed one victory; that was on the 4th of November 1989, against Wetherby ‘B’, a game Oakwood won by 26-6.
The Oakwood club went out of existence at the end of the 1989/90 season; the last reported fixture was away at Otley Viscounts on the 21st of April 1990. Oakwood lost that game by 32-6. It must have been very difficult to keep players motivated at a club that achieved so few victories. The body blow of losing the dressing rooms must also have depressed everyone involved. With such poor facilities and results, the Oakwood club was never going to attract the type of players who would raise standards sufficiently for the club to be able to join the Leagues. I assume that the players involved with Oakwood were happy to play at third and fourth team level. However, once the club really started to struggle for numbers I imagine that many of the Oakwood players decided to move to more established local clubs who could turn out full teams regularly and had their own ground and clubhouse.
The Leeds Chirons name disappeared in 1988 and after the demise of Oakwood in 1990, rugby union was no longer played on the pitch that Leeds Education Offices Sports Club and then Chirons had used for over sixty years.
