USARFU has divided America's college teams among four regions and empaneled a 15-person steering committee, solidifying the national body's plan for separating university teams from local and territorial unions.
'The seating of the college management council puts decisions on the issues facing the college game directly in the hands of college stakeholders,' chief executive Nigel Melville said earlier this week in a prepared statement.
Simultaneously, every school has been assigned to a district: east, south, central, or west. These will likely be posted next week on USARFU's web site, according to college director Todd Bell.
The moves nearly complete the second leg of Boulder's nine-part university plan for 2009-12. The first step, announced last fall, was articulating a vision of self-governing, NCAA-style conferences that are directly affiliated with USARFU.
Division 1 teams that wish to compete in USARFU's playoffs have until the start of the 2012-13 season -- 18 months from now -- June 1 to organize themselves into conferences. About 40 of America's 850-plus collegiate teams, spanning 4 divisions, have already done so.
The approach aims to reorganize rugby along the lines of mainstream sports while seizing on the demonstrable commercial power of university brands. Ironically, the new council looks rather like the union's old, so-called amateur board of directors.
Eight members are geographic representatives, while four of the group are non-voting chairs of sub-committees. Three are or have been members of congress, the group that was pushed aside for the current, 'professional' board.
The geographic orientation signals the union is persisting in efforts to reshape the seven territories into a format seen as more manageable. Two years ago, USARFU identified four 'high performance' regions that hardly got off the ground, while the restructuring of senior clubs into 'geographic unions' has been underway since 2007. To date, the primary result has been the collapse of America's senior representative competition.
The college council is determine its agenda, presumably following the contours of the strategic plan. Yet its budget is 'set and approved' by USARFU's board, seemingly limiting the scope of decision making. And while college students generate the lion's share of dues revenue, there is no check on the directors' ability to transfer monies to loss-making representative teams or elsewhere: the council cannot effect dollar-for-dollar returns through any legislative or oversight mechanism.
Among the strategic plan's unfinished objectives are pursuing NCAA sanction for women's rugby, a decade-long, Title IX-inspired initiative which has languished since being cut from the budget in 2009 and the departing of key staff. (Their private efforts continue at varsityrugby.org.) USARFU has also publicly committed to launching a competition to rival the USA 7s' Collegiate Rugby Championship.
Boulder has put the finishing touches on the College Premier League, set to kick off next month, but has not announced any sponsor agreements. One reason may be that all CPL revenues must go to the participants -- a direct reaction to USARFU's pocketing cash from 2008-09's National Guard pact while teams paid their own way to participate in the playoffs.
More commercial progress has been made by the nationally broadcast CRC or the conferences themselves, notably last week's Atlantic Coast Rugby League-Adidas pact.
The plan also calls for launching a coaches association, identified in the same section as conference 'restructuring'. The US College Rugby Association, which sprung up two years ago in reaction to perceived underfunding of college representative and All-American programs, is an independent organization. The forthcoming group is to be as a source of council members.
Chaired by USARFU director Pete Seccia, the council presently serves by fiat. There is no mechanism for election, and members' terms (i.e., length) of service are undefined, according to USARFU officials.
College Management Council
Chair: Pete Seccia (USARFU director)
East: Alex Magleby (Dartmouth), MaryBeth Mathews (Bowdoin)
Central: Scot Prunckle (Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Bill Sexton (Truman State)
South: James Farrar (South Carolina), Nancy Kechner (Virginia)
West: Ellen Owens (UC Berkeley), Matt Sherman (Stanford)
International athletes: Dan Payne (Life), Alex Williams (USARFU)
Committee chairs (non-voting): Kevin Battle (men's competition, UC Santa Barbara), Marty Bradley (eligibility, Tennessee), Jonathan Griffin (women's competition, Stanford), Sue Parker (women's strategic, Navy)
That comment about having 18 months and until the 2012-13 season for Div I teams to form conferences is incorrect.
Div I teams and any lower division teams that wish to get a jump on things have till June 1 in order to compete in the 2011-12 season.
Div II teams that don't get ahead of the game have presumably till June 1 of the following year (~15 months from now) in order to compete for the 2012-13 season when Div II is in the conference structure completely.
Posted by: Chip Auscavitch | 25 February 2011 at 09:56