AMERSHAM & Chiltern RFC will be in unchartered waters next season after wrapping up promotion with a devastating play-off victory over Frome on Saturday.

They smashed their guests 45-12 to follow Witney out of Southern Counties North and are now rubbing their hands at the prospect of facing High Wycombe, Marlow and Maidenhead in South West 1 East next season.

Director of rugby Matt Allen said: “This is my best achievement as a coach by an absolute mile.

“We have over-achieved, raised ourselves from week to week and really put the effort in.

“We’re relishing the chance to play at Level Six now, it’s the highest level the club has been in since the league restructure and I don’t think there’s any reason why we can’t go up again in another few years.

“At the moment we’ve got the squad to be more than competitive at the level above.

“I’m not sure we’ve got the players to push on from there next season, but we’d like to be playing National League rugby in two or three years.”

The potential at Weedon Lane is there. The club ran four senior teams for the first time in its history this year and the squad which demolished Frome was awash with emerging talent – six U19s were involved while the entire back row was under 25.

Allen said: “We’ll sit down and talk about next season in a few weeks, but these are very, very exciting times.”

At half time on Saturday though, it didn’t look so rosy.

Having lost to Witney at the end of the regular season to miss out on automatic promotion, Amersham made a sluggish start to their play-off match and were just 10-7 ahead at the interval.

Allen said: “Maybe the occasion got to us a bit in the first half, but in the second half we really came into our own.

“We came out and had a 15 minute patch where we played excellent rugby, we executed all our moves and were playing with pace.

“We scored three tries and a penalty and really put the game out of sight.”

Captain Dan Kinsey, Tom Grammenos, Ally Bruce, Ross Bugden, Jack Kenyon and Edward Ngatai all crossed the whitewash, providing the 300 home fans with a climax befitting the season.