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On jamboree events, redux

Trying to make some time tomorrow for collegiate finals, so only a few items...

One thing that makes it easier to get away is the flagship Division 1 matches are evening contests, which reflects the many games squeezed into the program.

In the Southern hemisphere, where night matches are disliked because playing conditions deteriorate, they scheduled thusly to accommodate TV. Here it feels more like jamboree rugby, an approach likely to dilute our best domestic 'product' in any number of ways, from field condition (too many curtain raisers) to atmosphere (afternoon barbeques replaced by blustery evenings).

Jamboree events contrast with the union's scheduling internationals simultaneously but separately from club or 7s championships. The decision making suggests where Boulder thinks its growth opportunities lie, and where it is trying to economize.

By the by, anybody else miss last year's webcasting?

Update: USARFU's ESPNU contract prohibits the union from its own webcasting of playoff matches, according to a union official. In effect, USARFU is expecting the sports network will reach more viewers, at a cost of less matches being available.

ESPNU's broadcast schedule (all times Eastern):

Highlight Show:                  Tues, May 12, 7pm
Men’s championship:          Wed, May 20, 9pm
Women’s championship:     Wed, May 20, 7pm

Regarding a query about trying to find sponsors on behalf of the New Zealand RU, chair Kevin Roberts reiterated that USARFU and the NZRU have a formal partnership (a 'special relationship') and noted 'we look whether we can uncover any joint commercial opportunities.'

'My only rugby commitment is USA Rugby,' he said in an email.

NorCal's referee society is on the verge of surpassing 50 reservations for its annual dinner, and may have to change venues. The catch: six weeks remain before the event. The catalyst for such enthusiasm must be the society's monthly training sessions and other continuing efforts, although free fare can't hurt.

Also looking forward to Saturday's San Francisco Golden Gate-Chicago Lions game. To my mind, the winner becomes second favorites, behind inconsistent finals performer Belmont Shore, in the Super League title chase.

On closing ranks round the USA 7s

The privately owned USA 7s has demonstrably outstripped American rugby’s other commercial endeavors, marking a new phase in efforts to tap the domestic sports entertainment market.

Since 2006, the tournament has re-established itself in a leading US rugby town, ensconced itself in a world-class venue, and connected with a Major League Baseball franchise. Thus the 2008 edition drew 34,000 paying fans, up 44 percent from year-ago figures and streets ahead of attendance in suburban Los Angeles.

Commercial sponsorship appears on a similar trajectory. Most important, the USA 7s is on its way to making money, according to people familiar with the matter.

By contrast, there have been continuing losses for the Churchill Cup and North American 4, owned and operated by USA Rugby in conjunction with other unions, and heavily reliant on RFU or IRB subsidies. The private Rugby Super League is self-supporting but far below the standard of the 7s World Series. And while the college championship may someday access the proven market for school sports, the Boulder would have to discard low-rent facilities like Albuquerque and begin compensating participating teams (as with NCAA football and basketball).

Indeed, American International Media, owner of the USA 7s and also Rugby Magazine, carries costs such airfare and accommodations for 16 teams plus international officials that easily supersede the aforementioned. When USA Rugby tried to run the 7s tournament at the Home Depot Center, it ruinously failed under the burden.

Since the emerging model suggests improvements in both cost management and revenue generation, USA Rugby should embrace the opportunity and sweep away anyone and anything that is slowing the tournament’s commercial progress, to benefit both the union itself and all who are part of the American game.

Every one of USA Rugby’s properties could benefit from ice cut by AIM – including those that will never be profitable but are nonetheless vital to dues-paying members – not only through of sales and sponsorship synergies, but also since the union still owns a small percentage of the 7s. It will start accruing royalties as soon the event turns cash-flow positive. (Boulder annually receives a licensing fee no matter the tournament’s financial performance.)

It’s far from clear that another 2005 licensing deal will turn out so well: the IRB is known to be worried about changing the game’s rules and gambling, as envisioned by the American Rugby Football League. USA Rugby is lucky the USA 7s was bought by Jon Prusmack, a good rugby man willing not only to absorb residual losses (such as the lease at Carson’s Home Depot Center) but also to hew to the game’s straight and narrow.

Let’s discard the baggage of politicos embarrassed they had to sell the event in 2005 to stave off bankruptcy, and close ranks around the USA 7s. One place to start: the union’s chairman and directors should all attend San Diego.

On the saying 'Good coaches coach, great coaches recruit'

Heavensgame is a new site that studies rugby's structural issues, treating them from a range of perspectives.

Published by Jeremy Benyon, a Welsh-born banker/financier living in Australia, the site has a cosmopolitan, eclectic feel to it as contributors hail from various places. (I have been asked to write a couple of stories, most recently on American high schools.) Check Heavensgame out here.

A recent interview with USA women's U20 coach Bryn Chivers (not by me) underlines a conventional, or Commonwealth-inspired, view of America.

While the program staff works hard to attend high school, college and U19 tournaments, they still only see a small fraction of the talented players that they know must be out there.  Chivers and his staff are constantly running camps across the US but he feels that they are not going to find the best players until the coaches take the initiative to promote the camps to their players.

And again:

The players live considerable distances away from each other, so evaluation presents its own challenges.

While the story accurately outlines the state of affairs, I think it misses the heart of America's promise. The great hope lies not in that there are so many players, and the chief problem is not in selecting the right ones. It is that there are so many talented athletes who could be first-class rugby players, but are not trained according to the best standards of American sports.

As I have not met Bryn, I could not say whether the article's takeaway is that of the author or the subject, who is Welsh-born. Since we know that some of America's greatest coaches have been foreign-born innovators, his background is hardly determinative of his worldview.

More important, our 'best and brightest' have understood both how to identify talent and how to bring America's domestic resources to bear. Although it better addresses a slightly different aspect of coaching's continuum, the old saying remains enlightening: good coaches coach, great coaches recruit.

On the Collegiate All-Americans

opinion If you’ve ever played abroad, it’s not hard to recognize the Collegiate All-Americans as one of our most distinctive teams.

Begin with the matchless heritage of the USA’s 1920 and 1924 Olympic gold medal winners. The All-Americans also boast organic ties to our college sports environment, collectively the world’s finest athletic training ground, bar none.

Then there is the proven contribution to the Eagles. All-timers such as Lippert, Chris O’Brien, Hein, Hodges, Shuman, and more recently MacDonald, Schubert, and Emerick started here.

Or maybe you have to have played here – in any sport really – to appreciate the draw card that is “college All-American” to rising generations.

The 2007 All-American campaign is not going well. Perhaps (hopefully) the tourists will rally. But it will be hard to put aside memories of an Inter-Territorial Tournament in a remote park with an open ditch but without service academy players. Also gone is the luster of playing the Irish Universities – Oxford next September falls in a new school year and cannot be the same.

Recently this team traveled to Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand. Now we settle for over the border, again, with the boys asked to pay their own way not two years after an unprecedented dues hike, the sale of the USA 7s, and a windfall International Rugby Board grant.

The matter recalls the ignominy of declining a test with touring England in 1991, or Eagles paying their own way to Denver for the 1992 Can-Am.

(As an aside, the last Canada Under-21 team to visit the US came to Long Beach in 1994, I believe, back when it was a home-and-away series. Kevin Dalzell played for the hosts, Mike James for the visitors. When will the junior Maple Leafs return?)

In a World Cup year, much time and money undoubtedly should flow to the Eagles. That is no excuse to allow the All-Americans’ standards to sag. Long since we have known better than to allow territorial coaches to double as selectors, or ask students to foot the bill, especially on short-notice fares.

Of course management is hard work, as it always has been. Who will be responsible for the rebuilding that must come next?

In Belmont's title, something new

opinion ‘Vintage Belmont,’ proclaimed one of the webcasters after the Long Beach team recovered from an 18-0 deficit to win the Super League championship Saturday.

Well, yes and no. Unbeaten over multiple regular seasons and playing in its sixth straight title game, Belmont obviously has notched a few comeback wins.

But it hasn’t been nearly so proficient in the finals, dropping three of five before this year’s contest. Perhaps the worst setback was 2006’s heartbreaker to archrival OMBAC, a game that should have been won.

For most of Saturday’s match, the Chicago Lions looked set to make it four of six. But Francois Viljoen’s XV showed great poise down the stretch, twice electing penalty kicks though still trailing by seven, confident there was time left to score the winning try.

Viljoen’s assuredness in the match-winning break was remarkable in itself. Though he has played flyhalf for Washington and more recently as a fill-in for injured Eagle teammates, the 26-year-old normally enters the line from fullback. And the pivotal try followed his botching a penalty goal that would have drawn the contest to within one.

Rising off the mat to land the championship fight’s knockout blow is not something Belmont is known for. The 2007 title reflects well on that group of veterans which has resisted 'Atlanta Braves/Buffalo Bills syndrome,' as well as first-year coach Jonnie Cox.

It will be interesting to see how the Lions respond to the narrow loss ending the club’s best-ever season.

On racing to the bottom

opinion This week’s flap over the presence of 10 internationals in the Scotland ‘A’ lineup is a reminder that so far as American rugby is concerned, ‘amateurism’ is synonymous with victimhood.

To recap, in an interview chief executive Nigel Melville questioned whether the Scotland Rugby Union was using the Churchill Cup to blood younger “developmental” players. Americans, expecting little of a test side shellacked by England ‘A’, had already retreated to clichés about  “professionals against amateurs.” Then the Eagles battled to a 13-9 loss.

At least as much should be expected of the 2007 national team. Peter Thorburn’s second edition has already enjoyed more time and resources than any of its predecessors.

Scotland is the smallest of the so-called tier 1 countries in terms of senior-grade playing numbers – which are in fact 64 percent below our own figures, according to the International Rugby Board. Soon the SRU will be down to just two professional franchises in the Celtic League.

Canada, another mid-sized Commonwealth country and our likely opponent in the Churchill’s final round, also provides government funding for elite players and has managed to place perhaps three dozen with European clubs. To New Zealander Thorburn, who inherited a US team that went 3-3 versus the Maple Leafs from 2003-05, this edge constituted the basis of last summer’s record loss in Newfoundland.

The American sports community has some experience with being the disadvantaged underdog, and it has taught us that there is a significant difference between professional and full-time.

For generations, many complained that Soviet-bloc Olympic athletes trained on a full-time basis while enjoying privileged lifestyles. Still, American part-timers and university students, making the most of what they had, routinely found their way to the top of the medal stand.

Such achievement demonstrates the crux of the matter: Of course there are benefits for players who can devote everything to playing sports, but an unequal starting line does not predetermine the order of finish. This is the essence of competition.

Knowing that neither domestic club rugby nor the union was going to be much help at the test level – whether before 1995 or afterward – our leading internationals have always held themselves accountable to their own, higher standards. In later years, they sometimes described themselves as “professional in attitude, amateur by circumstance.” Without exception, the best Eagle XVs have been filled with such overachievers.

Did Rugby Canada think it unfair that most of Wednesday’s Eagle starters played in the North American 4, against youngsters with patently little hope of making the World Cup squad? Probably not, because the Churchill Cup side had already been picked; but the “development” players who traveled to Palo Alto surely did not come down expecting to lose.

As for Scotland, anything less than a quarterfinal showing at the World Cup will be considered disastrous. Those expectations are the byproduct of standards which refuse to yield to the economic fact that the country struggles to support professionalized sport.

It is time for Americans to stop complaining about amateurism. Addressing the matter is what we pay full-time administrators to do. For the rest of us, it is a race to the bottom.

What's the point of the NA4?

opinion The poster marking Saturday’s North American 4 venue advertised “all-star rugby,” and the match leaflet underlined the point:

“The Falcons and Hawks have been training together for the last week and head into today’s match with basically the same coaching and game plan. So what will make the difference today?”

A very good question, ultimately left unanswered.

Immediately following a six-day assembly that saw America’s World Cup hopefuls all training together, 2007’s opening NA4 fixture was staged as a trial, rather than a contest between rivals. Perhaps that’s sensible in light of the approaching world championship, but any horizon extending beyond the next 20 weeks raises the question whether the International Rugby Board’s vision is being shortchanged.

Now in its second year, the NA4 appears more a decently funded Inter-Territorial Tournament than a nascent “cross border” competition to approximate the Super 14 or Heineken Cup as a developmental and commercial engine. The problem is that Americans have played, and watched, this kind of representative rugby for nearly 30 years, and know it is not “international caliber,” whatever the marketing may say.

Never mind that the Falcons and Hawks will shortly meet Canadian opponents. The two US squads have no innate identity, much less the teamwork that comes from playing as if all depends on victory, rather making the next World Cup squad. (On the latter point, witness the reserve benches virtually emptying right after halftime.)

Three hundred or so turned out to watch, thanks to OMBAC’s organizational prowess, and it’s safe to say not one was really rooting for the blue or the white team. Instead, they came to cheer a bevy of local heroes including Dan Payne, while afterward taking in OMBAC’s second grade against archrival Belmont Shore.

Once upon a time, America’s ITT was said to bring together the country’s top 100 players. Nearly 30 years on, thanks to the IRB, we know national coach Peter Thorburn’s idea of the 60 best footballers. What has really changed?

On coaching decisions

opinion So minor contretemps and long tenure will not deter USA Rugby in its choosing elite-level coaches after all. Well and good.

David Smyth, the incumbent All-American head man, has been retained despite last month’s local dustup in Utah. And why not, since it appears preliminary reports were tendentious? Nigel Melville was directly engaged in fact-finding, a good sign.

The chief executive’s January views seem less savvy, however. Shortly after he suggested that long-term appointments were a thing of the past, Kathy Flores was given a two-year extension – which would bring her to a total of seven years in the post.

"I don't think that the next [men’s] Eagle coach should necessarily coach through to the next World Cup. It's a very intense job," Melville told Goff on Rugby at the time.

Contracts of five, seven, or even ten years are quite standard in big-time American sports, and it would be difficult to persuade the coach of Notre Dame football, UCLA basketball, or many other Division 1 programs that international rugby is ever so much more stressful. How long has Alex Ferguson served Manchester United?

Separately, Northern California will require high school varsity (i.e., first) teams to wear IRB-standard numbered jerseys beginning April 1. Referees are empowered to enforce the requirement, including by ruling contests a forfeit, according to PelicanRefs.

On the TMO

opinion Some years ago in a rivalry match involving my club, I became touch judge on the spot.

“Our” penalty attempt flew high and almost directly over one of those stubby tournament goalposts, and the ref looked to me. The kick was wide, I signaled to local groans.

Several years later I recognized the agony of American referee Dave Head, officiating a San Francisco international between the Eagles and Hong Kong, and facing a similar decision. Rule it good and you’re a homer; rule it wide and you’re trying too hard to be fair.

This weekend’s Six Nations controversy over a Jon Wilkinson try which should have been disallowed brought these memories to life. Due not to a question of neutrality, but because a television match official (TMO) botched the call despite the advantages of time and technology.

I’ve never liked replay in rugby, football, or now even tennis. The Telegraph’s Mick Cleary puts the case eloquently:

Sport is about getting on with things, about taking the rough with the smooth and adapting to circumstances. Things aren't necessarily fair. Were we any the worse for it? I'm not sure we were.

Yet put these views aside. The tragedy of “progress,” I think, lies in the changed perception of what qualifies as a ref’s level-best effort. Since there now is “no reason” to get calls wrong, a bad decision must indicate stupidity or something darker.

I’ve always thought Dave Head’s decision to award three points was right, and wrote as much at the time. I hope mine was.

ITT: End of the line?

opinion The more one reads how important is the National All-Star Championship, the more likely it seems the competition is on its last legs.

This week, Boulder described the weekend tournament as “an absolutely essential step in the development of USA Rugby.” Really.

The union’s much-touted, six-month-old strategic plan glosses over inter-territorial play, and no one has ever described the NASC as a business asset. Meanwhile, as the International Rugby Board-sponsored North American 4 tournament has joined (most) domestic championships and international fixtures in late spring and summer, the December event looks to have been orphaned.

Many if not most territorial figures would prefer to dispense with one of their largest expenditures and instead spend money “at home,” on youth programs and the like. The very argument prevailed ten years ago, when the union first abandoned the Inter-Territorial Tournament.

Perhaps the union’s Competitions audit will find merit in the NASC, but the Board has already downgraded that exercise to a non-binding, “consultative” role. Among the directors, only Vic Hilarov is likely to harbor any nostalgia for the event.

True enough, there is urgency around interim coach Peter Thorburn’s review of test hopefuls this World Cup season. But that is no different than his predecessors, and Mr. Thorburn is not likely to be on hand after 2007, when the competition would need a real champion in order to survive.