Rugby sevens appeared at the Olympic level in 2016 and has been there ever since. Rugby is an NCAA Emerging Sport for Women as well, and the number of college programs continues to grow.
With so much happening, it was only natural for SDM to hear from Johnathan Atkeison, USA Rugby’s COO, about what’s ahead.
Growth of the Sport at the Youth Level
The biggest driver for growth of our playing numbers across the country is the youth level of the game. From the 2021-22 season to now, rugby has experienced 27 percent total growth. Interestingly, we’re also seeing growth year-over-year in our adult participation numbers (over 18, but most typically categorized as post-college) with 6.5 percent growth so far in the 2023-24 season over the year prior.
USA Rugby’s Growth Initiatives
In May of 2022, USA Rugby was awarded the hosting rights in the 2031 and 2033 Rugby World Cups, men’s and women’s, respectively. As part of the hosting, we have been developing, in partnership with World Rugby, a plan to drive participatory growth, fan and commercial growth, as well as national team performance across the 10-year period leading up to the games.
Those programs cover everything from school outreach programs to incorporate rugby into P.E. curriculum, to a women’s NCAA grant program, to professional competitions for our domestic players. In the lead-up to the Rugby World Cup hosting, we want to partner with our potential host cities to implement these initiatives in their markets to ensure we have a partnership that’s much deeper than merely hosting matches, one that ensures rugby participation in their market is both built sustainably and prepared for the influx of interest the event will drive.
Rugby as an NCAA Emerging Sport for Women
Rugby has always had a strong foothold in the American collegiate system. There are over 900 club rugby programs on campuses nationwide with a long and rich history of competition, in some cases over a century of existence, in fact. For many years, this was the main driver of growth for rugby in the United States and was the age at which most of our players were first exposed to the game.
Rugby is officially recognized as an emerging sport for women, with annual school sponsorship and growth at an all-time high. We’re just wrapping up an exciting project with the Pictor Group to talk about the next phase of development in that space, so keep an eye out in the next six months for some exciting developments. On the men’s side, we’ve seen many universities adopt rugby as a key component of their strategy to drive student enrollment.
We’re a low cost-per-head sport, we have excess capacity in terms of the number of students who graduate high school each year relative to the number of varsity sports available for them to continue pursuing the sport in the collegiate environment, and our studies show that a school-sponsored rugby program can be a net positive cash contributor in its first year of operations.
The Travel Rugby Scene
We see travel rugby tournaments as being one of the real growth sectors for the game in the next decade. Rugby has always had a strong tradition of “touring,” so hitting the road with your club is an intrinsic component of the social fabric of our sport. We host multiple national championship series events across the year for different age grades, and for the two disciplines of our sport, traditional 15s and the Olympic variant of sevens.
Additionally, multiple large events are held across the country each year, attracting upwards of 100 teams for unique experiences and competitive opportunities. We believe that given trends in the way individuals consume sports participation, tournaments and large events are poised to see a massive amount of growth in the next decade.
A Contact Sport of a Different Nature
We certainly understand that rugby is a physical sport, and we can’t shy away from the fact that contact is an inherent component of the game. Having grown up competing in both football and rugby, I have found the nature of the contact itself to be quite different. One of the biggest and most obvious differences is that in rugby, you don’t have a helmet and facemask standing between you and the player you’re trying to tackle! The practical effect is that rugby tackle form focuses on establishing leverage, rather than winning collisions. As football has increasingly focused on adopting new, safer techniques over the past decade, it’s no coincidence that they’ve turned to rugby-style tackling as one of the fundamental components.
World Rugby has recently introduced a new non-contact product called T-1, which is aimed at replicating many aspects of traditional rugby union game play, but without the physical contact, much like no-check hockey leagues, for example. We believe this will be one of the strongest growth sectors of the game in the future as people look for new opportunities to pursue fitness and community through sport.
The Olympics Have Heightened Awareness of Rugby
The Olympics are a great springboard for broader public exposure to our sport, and they provide an opportunity for people to discover us through their broader engagement with supporting Team USA. In fact, building on the exposure of the Tokyo Games, one of our rugby sevens athletes, Ilona Maher, is now the most followed rugby athlete in the world, male or female, on social media platforms.
The single largest growth we’ve seen in the last 20 years has been in sevens rugby, our Olympic format. Whereas traditional 15s rugby requires a commitment of 80 minutes (two 40 minute halves), and 15 players per side, and typically can only be contested once a week, sevens is much faster, with a 14-minute run time (two seven-minute halves), seven players per team and is contested in a tournament format with multiple games across a weekend. In some ways, it’s also less technically complex than 15s, and has allowed the game to penetrate new, untapped markets both here in the US and across the globe.
The Strength of Team USA
We’re in a great spot with our national teams. As part of the build-up to the 2031 and 2033 games, we’ve expanded our high-performance operations and have just brought on a new High Performance Director, Tamara Sheppard. She comes to us after a very successful stint leading Swimming Australia to record-breaking performances and will be focused on repeating that with our teams.
Both our men’s and women’s sevens programs have qualified for Paris, and both teams have consistently shown the ability to perform on the global stage. In fact, our women placed third last year in the global HSBC sevens series. Our 15s programs have both welcomed new coaches in the past year. Scott Lawrence has taken the helm on the men’s side and had notable victories in the last year. Sione Fukofuka has just taken over our women’s program, and they’re targeting strong performances in this spring’s Pacific Four tournament as a launchpad for Rugby World Cup 2025 qualification.
The Outlook is Positive
Rugby in the United States is truly on the precipice of a golden decade. With the hosting of the 2031 and 2033 Rugby World Cups on the horizon, we have worked with World Rugby (who are our joint-venture partners regarding the hosting) to put in place a “pre-legacy” concept. In essence, instead of using the revenue of event hosting to fund projects after the World Cup, we recognize that those funds are better spent in the preceding years to develop participation, fan engagement and performance.
It’s a truly progressive stance, and one that opens up a world of possibilities for our sport to not only capitalize on the growth opportunities which will result from the attention generated by the RWCs, but also gives us the opportunity to work with host cities to build a rugby culture in their own backyard to guarantee success. SDM
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