Wolfpack win title, moving up to second tier
Toronto putting part-timers behind as they earn right to play with ‘the big boys’
The Toronto Wolfpack’s coronation has felt inevitable for months.
After joining English rugby league’s lowest-level pro league in March, the Wolfpack entered Saturday 18-1-1, outscoring opponents 916-157 in the regular season.
But after Saturday’s 26-2 win over the Barrow Raiders, Wolfpack players and fans rejoiced with the fervour of a long shot that had just pulled an upset. The victory clinched the Kingstone Press League One title, and earned the Wolfpack a promotion to English rugby league’s second division with one game remaining.
For North America’s first trans-Atlantic pro sports team, the title felt like an against-the-odds triumph. Team CEO Eric Perez says the cham- pionship and promotion justify his emotional and financial investment in the pioneering expansion club.
“There were times I didn’t even know how I was going to pay rent,” Perez said after the game. “I didn’t know if I was going to eat a meal that night. Should I have some 40-cent pasta or should I try to eat something with some meat in it. That’s how it was to start rugby league in Canada.”
As Perez addressed the media, majority owner David Argyle walked over and high-fived him. Even before the club took the field, its financial backers had spent big to field a team deep enough to earn a promotion in its first year.
Where many of their third-division peers include both amateurs and pros, the Wolfpack signed players well-known to rugby aficionados.
Off-the-field expenses added up, too. This season the Wolfpack paid transportation and housing costs for visiting teams, and will do it again in the second division.
Earlier this week Perez told reporters the club likely won’t turn a profit until it reaches the top-tier Super League, full of well-funded clubs that can afford their own overseas travel.
But before that happens the Wolfpack will need to triumph in the second division, where they won’t have the chance to fatten their record against clubs fielding part-time pros. Head coach Paul Rowley offered a sober assessment of the challenge facing his club in 2018.
“We’re playing players of a much higher standard,” Rowley said. “This is it now. We’re in with the big boys. We’ve just jumped from softball to baseball.”
Continuing to win is vitally important to a club hoping to grow its hardwon niche in Toronto’s crowded pro sports market.
Perez says the team designed its regular-season schedule to avoid head-to-heads with the Blue Jays and Toronto FC, more established franchises that offer stiff competition for ticket-buyers. But Saturday, with TFC playing at nearby BMO Field and the Jays playing at the Rogers Centre, the Wolfpack drew a season-high 7,972 to Lamport Stadium.
A crowd that size hints that the first-year team has cultivated fans of its own, and those supporters have, in turn, grown on the players.
Hooker Bob Beswick spent last season injured, disillusioned and considering giving up rugby. But Rowley talked Beswick into joining the Wolf- pack, and even at the end of a long season the 32-year-old feels energized.
“I don’t think I’ve enjoyed rugby like this for quite a while,” Beswick said. “I want to move here and live here but I’m a lad from Wigan and trying to drag my wife and mother in law from Wigan might be a tough ask.”
The Wolfpack’s presence has also prompted third-division competitors to improve. When Barrow visited in May they lost a 70-2 blowout, but competed evenly in Saturday’s first half before losing by 24.
Rowley acknowledges his club had to work harder than expected to subdue Barrow, but said they’d compensate later for the extra effort expended on the field.
“We’ll bleed a little bit more and have a few more stitches under out eyes,” Rowley said.
“We’ll do it the hard way and we’ll drink a few more beers on the back of it tonight.”