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The Roar

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Watch out All Blacks, the Yanks are coming

4th November, 2016
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Rugby in the United States of America continues to grow. (Adam Davy / PA via AP)
Roar Guru
4th November, 2016
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1855 Reads

Imagine, for a moment, that instead of fronting up to Ireland tomorrow morning (AEST), the All Blacks are taking on the USA Eagles on Chicago’s hallowed Soldier Field.

Not too difficult, the All Blacks played the Eagles at that venue two years ago and gave them a good old thumping.

But now imagine, that instead of a middling Tier 2 Test nation that should trouble neither the scoreboard operator nor the World Champs, the Eagles are a global powerhouse off the game.

A team chock filled with NFL or NBA-level talent. Seriously big, fast, strong and tough athletes who have played rugby most of their lives and are earning millions from the sport.

Riches courtesy of giant deals stitched up to broadcast the ‘big show’ – the wildly successful Pan-American National Rugby Football League (NRFL) and Eagles’ regular Tests against fellow Tier One nations.

Imagine the equivalents of all-time great wide receiver Jerry Rice on the wing, Tom Brady at five-eighth and the ‘Minister of Defence’ Reggie White at prop. Hulking seven-foot specimens that, if they didn’t choose rugby over basketball could otherwise be the NBA’s new Larry Bird or Shaquille O’Neal, packing down at lock in an impossibly massive and dynamic pack.

A nation threatening an usurp the All Blacks as the game’s dominant team.

If you can imagine that you might just be taking a glimpse into the future of US rugby.
Because the kids are going nuts for it there. Today 2.1 million youngsters play rugby in the US, making it the nation’s fastest growing sport.

And the growth has been explosive.

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According to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, the number of rugby players in the United States doubled between 2008 and 2013, to 1.2 million. And it’s taken just three years to nearly double again. All this in a period where the numbers of kids playing American football and baseball have been in steady decline. 


By 2010, the number of registered senior players in the US had outstripped the numbers playing in Wales and Scotland.

Indeed, rugby participation in the US grew 350 per cent between 2004 and 2011.

All those new players are being well catered for by mushrooming tournaments and structures.

USA Eagles' Mike Petri

In Sevens the Collegiate Rugby Championship has partnered with NBC Sports every year since 2010, The HSBC World Sevens Series has played in Las Vegas since 2004-05. Attendance for the latter has ballooned, from 15,800 in 2004 to the more than 80,000 that packed in to catch the action at this year’s tournament, won by eventual Rio Golden boys Fiji.

The fact there’s now Olympic bullion up for grabs has proven a major impetus for the Americans to become competitive in the abbreviated version of the game.

The Eagles’ maiden Sevens World Series tournament triumph in London two years ago and landmark win over the Kiwis in the Dubai tourney less than a year ago, just a couple of examples of their rising prominence.

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In the full blooded version of the game, 2017 marks a watershed year for US rugby with the launch of the fully professional NRFL.


And like most things in American sport, the big take up has been no accident.

USA Rugby CEO, former England halfback Nigel Melville, explained to US Journo Professor Roxane Coche in this post, that initiatives targeting the youth market were introduced in eight years ago.

In order to make parents understand the game, which is widely perceived in the US as a violent sport played by lunatics with no pads, USA Rugby had six to 12-year-olds play a version of touch called Rookie Rugby.

Melville told Coche that since 2008, “more than two million kids have been through the program across 43 state rugby organisations…. (creating) great momentum for the sport” as those first children have now grown up to play in high school and college. .”

Hell-bent on commercialising the sport, USA Rugby has created a new commercial entity, Rugby International Marketing (RIM) – with England’s RFU on board as a minority shareholder. Melville explained that this “‘for-profit’ company will grow commercial activities to fund the game, and improve the visibility of the sport on TV and on a new digital channel, Over the Top.”

Women’s rugby is also going gangbusters stateside, the more than 20,000 registered female players means the US has more women rugby players than any other country.

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High-end fashion mag Vogue didn’t do any harm to the profile of the women’s game with a spread on the USA Rugby Women’s Sevens team in the lead in to their Olympic debut earlier this year captioned: “Will Women’s Rugby Be the Next Women’s Soccer in the U.S.?” 


Meanwhile, New England Patriots defensive back Nate Ebner made history when he became the first active NFL player to compete at a Summer Olympics when he laced up for the US Men’s Sevens team in Rio.

And it was hardly a rush of blood into the unknown for Ebner who, ten years prior, became the youngest-ever US Sevens player at age 17 before going to Ohio State, where he straddled rugby and American football until swept up by the NFL.

And where there’s eyeballs the media will follow, and vice versa.

The US’s Olympic Network, NBC, is the official channel of rugby in US, broadcasting several tournaments including the World Sevens in 2011 in which 5,4 million viewers tuned in to watch team USA and that year’s World Cup from which NBC broadcast several matches live for the first time.

Cable channels are also broadcasting an increasing amount of the code.

Still, even if rugby was to go anywhere near being a dominant player on the US sporting landscape, it would not be for a generation or two.

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It will be interesting to see if many Windy City locals will ease wild celebrations of their long-awaited Cubs World Series Baseball triumph long enough to notice there’s a couple of rugby games on in their backyard this weekend.

But would’t it be an awesome thing to watch the US fulfil its rugby potential over the coming decades?

Especially given the news that China is going big on rugby, with a lazy $100m investment from e-commerce giant Alibaba to develop the game and set up professional leagues for men and women in both 15s and sevens by the start of 2020.

It’s incredible to think that China can just turn on the tap like that and decide to get good at a sport from scratch. But, of course, they can.

Rugby’s global menagerie will be all the richer for the inclusion of a Bear and a fully grown Eagle.

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