Read on if you are from a small club, because this is about feeder systems. Yes, bar talk. What a weekend it's been, all on the wonderful West coast, or nearly anyway. On Friday night it was Ardrossan's seventy-fifth anniversary bash with Craig Chalmers, Scott Hastings, Bill Nolan, Gavin Hastings, local plumber Willy Carson and me. And, what a belter it was, too.

Three hundred and seventy-five folk turned up at Seamill Hydro for what turned out to be the Ayrshire invitation beer drinking competition. A very late event.

On Saturday night it was the Strathendrick dinner in Fintry. The village of Fintry has only 4000 people, but 750 folk have joined the sports club.

I sat beside Ian Bruce, of

Strathendrick, and Joe Smith from Bannockburn - formerly St Modan's - and I learnt about the idea behind the Forth Valley rugby set-up with its feeder

system. I also learned that the inestimable Easton Roy has been playing this year, only last week indeed, and the strapping 22-year-old who had propped against him thought he hadn't done too badly having only been in the air once during the game, until, that is, he was told that Easton is 75 years old.

At Ardrossan, their colts are the best they have ever been, tutored by former Glasgow wing forward Gavin Angus, and

Strathendrick have a group of youngsters with real talent. The problem is how do those clubs get some benefit from them before they are drawn away by bigger clubs.

All small clubs know the worst thing that can happen to your best youngsters is to have then sneaked away in the close season, league tied by a bigger club, or made unreasonable promises as to where and when they are going to play, and then dropped to a second XV, or worse, for the rest of the season.

The same message comes through when you speak to all of these smaller clubs, and that is they almost understand that they can't keep their hugely talented players. For example, Ardrossan produced Bryan Gossman, while Strathendrick gave us Stewart Campbell and West's Dave

Barrett.

All small clubs say they realise their good players have to go, but want is an assurance that if they don't make the grade they can come back again.

Or they feel they should be getting a senior player, perhaps at the end of his career, back in exchange.

Big Gav made the point at the Ardrossan dinner that what we were seeing there - nearly 400 folk at a rugby club dinner - can't be allowed to die, and both the rugby evenings I have been to over the weekend gave me such a buzz about the game again that you wouldn't believe it.

But here is the rub. Up to a point, you can't just take players away from these clubs and give them nothing back. You can't, as a big club, rape them of their

talent and then leave players ejected from the system too embarrassed to go back down to the clubs they came from. There has to be another answer.

I was at a lunch before last weekend's match between West and Melrose. Alan and Ian Stark were there. ''The Hawks thing, with a merger between GHK and Accies, is a great idea,'' said Cambuslang captain Alan Stark. ''But why were we never spoken to?''

It turned out that they felt they would rather be part of a formal feeder set-up which saw something coming back for their

talent drain than read about it through the papers and dread the fact they might now have to pay all of their players to stall the likelihood of their best ones being taken away.

At Strathendrick, I found out that the Forth Valley association of rugby clubs is exactly that, a

feeder system. The players who go don't have to actually join the club up the ladder they play for, in their instance probably Stirling County, and they can come back and play for their own club if they don't make the first XV or they are dropped.

The movement back down is as important as the move up. Which I think is a sensible way to go. Don't you? You could say that's what district rugby is all about, but we need a little

sensible feeding to stop the sharks getting just a little fat.