For those who play it, whether professionally or as amateurs, rugby is more than a sport — it is a way of life. Playing rugby requires respect, discipline, and cooperation from its athletes, and it takes an immense amount of courage to play: only a handful of reasons for the sport’s hallowed history and crucial role in university athletics.
Over the past few years, rugby has gained popularity internationally — the Rugby World Cup is the third largest sporting event in the world, with a cumulative audience of almost four billion viewers during the 2011 competition hosted in New Zealand. Two years earlier, in 2009, Rugby sevens, a variation of the game with seven players on each side instead of 15, was approved as an Olympic sport, and it will be introduced at the next games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
Rugby became recognized as a professional sport in 1995. In Europe, amateur competition disappeared and was replaced by professional championships. It became a career that required all the sacrifices and commitment of an elite-level sport. As a result of this shift, more and more young players have given up post-secondary studies in order to maximize their chances of achieving a professional career. Now, players are recruited at a very young age and some even begin playing in international competitions at 18 — French international Gael Fickou for example.
North America, however, has a different tradition. Many American and Canadian athletes value university competitions, and with a few exceptions, players selected for national teams have a post-secondary education and have participated in university level play. The lack of professional rugby leagues in North America pushes universities, and national development programs, to the forefront, regarding the formation and development of young players.
In the United States, rugby is one of the few sports that are not regulated by the NCAA. Indeed, USA Rugby — the national governing body for rugby in the United States — is in charge of the creation and development of interuniversity competitions.
In Canada, rugby is regulated by the CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sport), and by the various provincial university athletics associations — in Ontario women’s rugby is played at both the provincial (OUA) and national (CIS) levels, while men’s rugby is only played at the provincial level. Many voices have called for the integration of men’s rugby as a CIS sport, but there are no signs indicating a move in that direction.
The answer may very well lie in the explosion of Rugby sevens in recent years. In 2011 Rugby Canada created the first national university sevens tournament, a successful competition that has been growing ever since. Similarly, USA Rugby created the Collegiate Rugby Championship in 2010, a university sevens tournament broadcasted on NBC.
With the explosion of sevens, there is a lot of potential for the development of rugby in North America. Increasing public interest and the potential financial gains should be sufficient incentive for Canadian universities, and the CIS, to invest in the development of the sport in Canada.
