World Cup Sevens may be signaling U.S. growth

SAN FRANCISCO — This summer, it is the “other World Cup.” One week after soccer’s grandest tournament ended in Russia, the rugby world converged on San Francisco for a far more modest competition.

The Rugby World Cup Sevens, which ran Friday through Sunday at AT&T Park, consists of 24 men’s teams and 16 women’s teams vying for a world championship in the wide-open, high-octane, seven-player version of the sport. It was expected to draw about 100,000 fans. NBC Sports Network televised the event, one of the biggest gatherings for rugby sevens, and American ruggers accustomed to toiling in the shadows hope it will be another step toward establishing the sport’s legitimacy in the United States.

The tournament came at a crucial moment for rugby in the United States, where the sport’s advocates have been promising a rugby boom for a generation. But a little more than a year before the big-boy Rugby World Cup in Japan for the 15-player version of the sport, American rugby has struggled in recent months to overcome infighting, miscalculations and excessive optimism.

Several top executives and board members at USA Rugby, the national governing body, left in recent years as their plans to bolster the sport, including the organization of this Rugby World Cup Sevens, went awry. The most notable misstep was starting a for-profit marketing and media company that included a digital network to stream competitions. The venture sputtered from the start. Its operations are being folded back into USA Rugby.

Then there is the tension over how to spend the organization’s scarce resources. Some advocates lean toward building up the national team to try to create positive publicity for the game. Others say more money should be funneled into the youth game to produce the players of tomorrow.

“It’s a double-edged sword because for a long time adults paid most of the dues and got most of the benefits,” said Paul Bretz, a school principal in Newark, California, who runs youth rugby programs. “But if the goal is to grow the youth game, the funding needs to go to the kids.”

Rugby’s boosters point to statistics showing it is the fastest growing team sport in the United States. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, 1.6 million people played rugby at least once last year, nearly twice as many as in 2012. The number of people who played at least eight times has risen 45 percent over the same period.

A growing proportion of these participants are young, not just the college students who have been the core group of players for years. (The game is played on about 900 college campuses, though almost entirely on the club level.)

Players, coaches and administrators hope this Rugby World Cup Sevens, the first on U.S. soil, will finally inch the sport closer to the mainstream, much the way soccer capitalized on the 1994 FIFA World Cup.

“We’re just on the cusp,” said Will Chang, a former board member at USA Rugby who helped win the bid to host the World Cup Sevens. “Twenty years ago, soccer was very much a castoff sport. Rugby is probably no different than soccer was in the early 1990s.”