The 1990s gave rise to Super Rugby and the Heineken Cup, a pair of 'cross border' leagues featuring top teams from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa or France, Great Britain, and Ireland, respectively. They readily caught on with fans but officials saw them as problematic, until it became clear the participants were separating themselves from domestic rivals left out of the mix.
By 2005, Commonwealth experts working in America uniformly believed that USARFU needed a cross-border league with Canada. The view was deeply intertwined with the International Rugby Board's goal of commercializing rugby in North America as soon as possible.
The North America 4's first two seasons were disappointing for any number of reasons. 
From a development perspective, then-Eagle coach Peter Thorburn's use of established internationals, some of whom were competing professionally in Europe, limited opportunities for up-and-comers. The Canadians went the youth route, and Canada West won the 2006 and 2007 titles.
In year three, by which time Scott Johnson had replaced Thorburn, the NA4's schedule was trimmed, cutting assembly and game time. Canada West won a third straight crown. Also in 2008, USARFU allowed the 29-year-old National All-Star Championship, an inter-territorial tournament of 200-plus players paying their own way in hopes of higher opportunities, to fold.
2009 was still more disastrous. Steered by a chastened IRB, the cross-border tournament was broadly revamped to include 4 Canadian competitors and a new Argentine entrant -- but only a single American squad. Our closest rivals reworked their provincial calendar to dovetail with the revised schedule, while US left its territorial teams fallow. At a stroke, Canada doubled its number of players gaining sub-international experience, while the USARFU's pool was cut in half.
Further, the competition was moved to September and October, ostensibly to bring it closer to the November international season. In practice, the shift all but precluded college players, since the season was now at the start of the school year. New US coach Eddie O'Sullivan underlined the change by declaring that USA 'A' would primarily consist of domestic players who had already won caps.
The reduced number of games and roster slots, combined with the fall schedule, effectively converted the renamed Americas Rugby Championship from a development vehicle into a warmup series for the November international season. Perversely, O'Sullivan was quoted in a USARFU release as saying that 'Selecting a [ARC] pool without calling on our overseas professional players certainly forces us to dig deep on the depth chart', a chart that had been diminished by the union itself.
The ARC's first year saw Ontario scalp USA 'A', which finished fourth. Year 2 saw Tonga 'A' join the fold, rather incongruously, and the two-week event staged in Cordoba. The shadow Eagles downed the 'Ikale Tahi (Sea Eagles) but lost to Canada 'A' and Argentina's Jaguars.
Starting from scratch
Amid efforts to establish the NA4, USARFU was assembling a High Performance department, responsible for international and representative age-grade players, coaches, and referees. Its charter comprised technical and administrative programs such as athlete identification, fitness, sports medicine, and drug testing.
The 2008 HP plan ran to 60 pages, many of them filled with ambitious, start-from-scratch objectives. One example: 'The high performance manager will identify and award licensed training center status to a minimum of 4 centers within his or her region by the end of 2008. This will be a total of 16 locations nationwide'.
In outlining the facilities' intended capabilities and functions, the document frequently spelled 'centre' in the Commonwealth fashion. This was consistent with specifications that player testing was to be conducted in metric measurements, following the standards of the New Zealand Rugby Union. (Weight testing, an exception, was specified in pounds.) So aligned, USARFU positioned itself as if competing for athletes with the Auckland or Canterbury unions, rather than football or basketball, and thereby took itself outside the mainstream of America's youth sports. Recruiting crossover athletes is that much more difficult if test scores have to be converted.
One of the department's high-profile objectives was developing pathways for age-grade teams. Another was to bring on four HP managers charged with spotting and shaping players for select-side honors. It proved very slow going. Although IRB funds began arriving in late 2005, the first HP staffers didn't get started until more than two years later, at the beginning of 2008.
In hiring Scott Lawrence and Matt Sherman, two recent internationals who reported to president of rugby operations (and chief executive) Nigel Melville, the union covered the country's eastern and Pacific coast regions. Staffers responsible for the midwest and west were to follow. Lawrence left in less than a year, citing family commitments. Plans for two more HP managers as well as Lawrence's replacement were shelved in January 2009, as the economy had gone south. 'Regional high performance centers staffed by full-time specialist staff will have to wait', Melville said in a blog post.
In its 2008 'scorecard' assessment, prepared for the board of directors, the national office credited itself with launching four HP regions, acknowledging three were unstaffed. Regarding the 8 desired HP facilities (down from 16, without comment), the self-evaluation owned up that only Sherman's Pacific region had identified candidates, and these were not yet certified.
On a brighter side, the scorecard noted the IRB's approval of HP grants for 2009-11, worth £600,000 ($930,000) in each of the first two years and £650,000 ($1 million) for the last, a World Cup season. Also in 2008, USARFU announced it would reduce the Super League by two teams while introducing a promotion-relegation mechanism with division 1. The union further said 2009 would see the return the senior all-star championship to a four-team, springtime format.
Promotion-relegation never went through, in part because the decision lay not with USARFU but Rugby Super League, which is operated by member franchises such as New York Old Blue or San Francisco Golden Gate, much like England's Premiership. Targeting the revised NASC for springtime demonstrated USARFU's failure to anticipate the ARC's shift. Too late, an August 2009 report to the board discussed plans for a summertime, six-team city-based competition that would constitute the basis of future ARC teams. 'Progress is being made with a group of potential investors', it read. Representative competition replacing the NASC, first established as the Inter-Territorial Tournament back in 1979, has yet to be restarted.
In a separate submission to the US Olympic Committee, USARFU indicated a 'national academy program' had been created to encompass the high school and college All Americans as well as the USA Under 20 team. What was its purpose?
The current pathway, if developed and activated as planned, is capable of recruiting and developing players through the current streams within the domestic game. The inevitable increase in the profile of rugby will make it necessary to develop a more aggressive recruitment strategy to attract athletes from the traditional US sports. That recruitment strategy must be accompanied by a program, which will induct the 'crossover athlete' into the USA Rugby Pathway at the appropriate and optimum level. This will be achieved using the National Academy Program that will provide a development curriculum for players to follow.
The paper indicated the city-based league would commence in 2010. It did not appear in 2011 either, nor was the ARC contested, since its fall schedule conflicted with the World Cup itself.
All Americans to the rescue
Just before the 2007 world championship, Rugby Magazine analyzed a 37-man squad of probables (7 of whom were subsequently cut), asking whether these elites had played in US high schools and/or colleges, and for the USA Under 19s and/or the Collegiate All Americans. The data was compared with a 50-man squad from 18 months earlier, in February 2006.
The number of past All Americans had dropped precipitously, to 8 from 27. Adjusting for the different squad sizes, the decrease was nearly 60 percent. Just 3 of the 37 probables, meanwhile, had represented the USA at the Under-19 world championships. Thorburn, a New Zealander, had turned his back on college ball, and the comparatively well-funded age-grade route was not replacing it. But the percentage of foreign-born players had quickly climbed to 30 percent from 18.
2007 marked the first season the US national team did not win a single game. The Eagles' IRB ranking dipped to 19th, from 14th at the start of 2006, when chair Kevin Roberts and chief executive Melville took the reins.
Reliance on foreign-born players accelerated under Johnson and then O'Sullivan, even though America's number of teenage players continued growing. The Australian particularly disdained domestic teams, and as we have seen, the NA4 and and USARFU's HP department were laboring. By the time of the 2011 World Cup, 40 percent of the squad was foreign-born, the World Cup's second-highest total.
To be fair, O'Sullivan made ample and good use of All Americans. During the Irishman's first year at the helm, the 2008 collegiate team which Melville had led to New Zealand -- Johnson joined the tour party only in its final week -- advanced 11 players to international 7s or 15s. Six ultimately returned to the Shaky Isles as part of the 2011 World Cup roster: Pat Danahy (Stanford, Trinity, and Life College), Eric Fry (Cal and Las Vegas Blackjacks), Colin Hawley (Cal and Olympic Club), Blaine Scully (UCLA and Cal), Hayden Smith (Metro State and Saracens), and skipper Kevin Swiryn (St. Mary's and Agen). (A seventh, Chris Biller, earned collegiate honors in 2005-07 and 2009 and would likely have made the 2008 team, but for a season-ending injury.)
Indeed, 13 former All Americans traveled to the 2011 World Cup, including captain Todd Clever and Paul Emerick, both of whom had become Eagles even more immediately after winning school recognition, and were now among America's all-time cap leaders. But only 2 4 more age-graders made the cut, indicating the approach had not grown more productive.
This year's World Cup team defeated Russia while rattling Ireland and Italy. The Eagles thus moved up to 17th place in the IRB standings.
In an email, Roberts described 2011 as 'a great World Cup for the Eagles... They played superbly, competed ferociously, and were wonderful ambassadors for the country'.
Overlooking the obvious
To Scott Johnson, the problem was very clear.
'I played against America 20 years ago and they haven't moved forward. From the limited time I've been here, the reason they haven't gone forward is that we [they] haven't got a pathway for young people to go through', the US national team coach told the IRB's press service in August 2008, four months after his appointment.
'I think rugby needs America to be strong, and the only way you can be strong is consistency and ... a pathway for those young people to go through. So I'm going to start again, and we're going to get some young people on a pathway, and whoever comes in after me will have a far easier job than I had'.
According to this widely held view, the US failure to join rugby's elite is mainly attributable to a poor system for promoting good young players.
It's simplistic as well as offensive. American domestic competition may be uneven, but the 'top of the pyramid' has its own problems. Even if more players were beginning in their pre-teens, representative sides below the senior level are compromised by the US academic calendar or pay-to-play selections. More important, two- and three-week camps and tours may be important yardsticks, but are too short for substantive individual development. For America's top players just as for everyone else, high school, college, and club teams provide the majority of regular training -- free of charge to USARFU.
This means that Boulder's real imperatives are talent identification and athlete progression, and the primary measure of effectiveness is the rate of graduation to the test squad. While it's always tempting to focus on the best current players, the value lies in finding the ones that project beyond high school honors to college All American status, to the 7s team, and ultimately to the Eagles. Similarly, it is comparatively easy to pick out the Nese Malifas, already possessed of subtle skills by the time they reach American shores, but difficult to assess the likes of Emerick, a one-time linebacker and wrestler who became a rugby All American out of the little-known University of Northern Iowa. The latter category represents America's playing base, and so the country's scalable upside.
Millions have gone into attempts to seed age-grade and cross-border play, neither were significant contributors to the 2011 World Cup campaign, and there is now less opportunity in select-side rugby than there was at the end of 2005. USARFU, by allowing blue-sky plans to crowd out imperfect but functioning systems, lost sight of these primary objectives. Having gone 3-19 over 2007-08, the national team's salvation sprang from a generation of college athletes, and the main problem with America's pathway turned out to be overlooking the obvious.
Coda: The 7s Eagles, under Al Caravelli, have been a significant route to the 15s team but are not treated here. Though the trend is very likely to continue, the exception reflects the focus of the series: evaluating management's performance.
The USA national team, 2007-11
