Much is made of the home-grown players who have progressed through the Bulls’ Academy, and rightly so, but the club’s Foundation manager Gareth Cook makes a salient point.

“Their hopes of becoming a professional rugby league player don’t start at 16 with Paul Medley – they start at six or seven years old with us and local amateur clubs,” says Cook, who has been in his post for almost two years, having worked in similar roles at Leeds Tykes and Leeds Rhinos.

“As the club’s registered charity, we try and create the pathways for youngsters to get into amateur clubs and that’s where they’re picked up.”

The Bradford Bulls Foundation was formed in 2004 and now works with 50,000 adults, children and young people each year across six key areas: sport/disability sport, health, education, social inclusion, heritage and arts/culture.

Cook heads a team of seven full-time members of staff and one part-time, based in the Foundation Hub opposite the ticket office at Odsal.

Their work is wide-ranging, as Cook explains: “We do a lot of coaching in primary schools with girls and boys and work with the amateur clubs through an ambassador scheme.

“Three Bulls players are assigned to each amateur club and they will go three or four times a year to do presentations and coaching sessions. “We also coach the Bradford University team, run a successful programme there and have had a couple of players come into the Academy.

“There are three or four lads who are playing at West Bowling now, so we’re steadily increasing participation – and that’s the main goal: to give the club more players to pick from and to have as many home-grown players as possible.”

A strong working relationship with Francis Cummins and his players helps – Heath L’Estrange is an ambassador for the charity.

Cook said: “The players are a big thing for the Foundation. We actually run the player appearance procedure, which involves a weekly meeting with Franny, and since January the players have made 110 appearances in the community through this programme.

“I don’t think you would get that in many other sports. We have great support from Franny and the players to enable us to do that.”

The Foundation run assemblies to give healthy lifestyle messages to about 30,000 young people a year.

They also run the Champions schools programme, which is another national initiative which aims to get more secondary schools playing competitive rugby league.

The Foundation also offers literacy and numeracy programmes to primary schools, again using the brand of the club.

Cook said: “We’re probably the flagship foundation for heritage. We did the Trevor Foster Wall, we conduct stadium tours and work with amnesia and dementia sufferers of Marie Curie and the NHS.

“In terms of our social inclusion, we work with 13 to 19-year-olds with the youth service and we also do our own projects.

“The highlight was the Leeds game on Good Friday last year when we did 120 young children singing on the pitch pre-match and they released their own CD.

“We had 11,500 kids here last year during the Olympics and broke a world Zumba record.

“We work with around 50,000 people per year – young people, adults and children – and the Foundation is a stand-alone charity.”

As with any charity, funding is an issue. Cook said: “We rely on government grants, bids, donations – that’s how we keep the services going that we run.

“We think we do a really good job around the city. All the services that we do benefit adults, children and young people in Bradford. We’d like to grow it and extend what we do.”

When the Bulls became embroiled in a financial meltdown last year, the Foundation remained in place but was not unaffected by the crisis.

Cook said: “As a separate company, the redundancies didn’t affect us. However, it did affect how we applied for funding because we’re based here.

“People who were maybe going to give us some funding were a bit sceptical but another way to raise money as a charity was through fundraising events.

“We didn’t have any luck with it because people were donating £100 to the club. People were thinking ‘why would we give any more to the charity?’ “It put a rather big stop on our funding bids but nobody lost their job. We’ve got a lot of things now that we’ve reapplied for that we can go for and are waiting to hear back from them.

“The club have been very good to us in terms of putting some of the sponsors they’ve got onto the charity because we can help to meet their corporate and social responsibilities.

“I think we all share the same idea that if they want home-grown players in the team, then we’re a big part of where that process starts.”