The Eagles Have Landed - Advantage Girls Rugby

With the Women’s Rugby World Cup underway in England, the sport’s breakout star USA’s own Ilona Mayer is center stage. If you followed along last summer, the USA Women’s 7s won the first rugby medal in 100 years (Alex Sedrick’s last moment heroics!) A month later, Maher landed the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and continued her ascendancy taking the stage on Dancing with the Stars and winning an ESPY this summer.

She’s back in the spotlight as a record 42,723 attended the USA vs. England opener in Sunderland on Friday. Rugby’s large global footprint has taken hold here in the US with the “Maher-Sedrick effect” acting as just one of the drivers. Maher’s charismatic, body-positive, media-adept and multitalented skills are a big deal. How big? Look at how she currently stacks up against the reigning MVPs across popular sports in the US.

No boom is without some messiness. To start there are two major flavors of rugby: 15s (also called Union) and 7s. No other sports have a 15-on-a-side set up and as for the friendly number 7s — just a few like Water Polo and Handball. These two varieties of rugby also vary wildly in duration (think sprint vs distance race) with 7s contested for just 14 minutes and 15s for 80.

With variations in rule play come more layers of governing oversight and competitive leagues/competitions. At the very top internationally sits World Rugby as the sport’s governing body. In Olympic years, they work with the International Olympic Committee for rugby’s inclusion in the Olympic Games — currently Rugby 7s. USA Rugby governs the sport in the USA especially as it pertains to international teams.

Ilona Maher led Quinnipiac University (CT) to 3 straight titles in college. But the landscape is much more complex than that resume line might indicate.

At the high end, rugby in college is regionally fractured. Most top eastern programs fall under the National Intercollegiate Rugby Association (NIRA) whose express goal is to get to 40 programs and move from an NCAA “emerging sport” to an NCAA championship sport. They are currently at 25.

Some 40+ other schools in the west, Florida, and a smattering of independents are part of Collegiate Rugby Association of America (CRAA) which forms several divisions based on competition level. In college, 15s is normally the marquee fall sport with 7s as something new played in the spring.

So, NIRA teams have the veneer of the NCAA and the trappings of a “varsity sport” on campuses. USA Rugby, however, governs CRAA which forms the bedrock of the elite college club rugby and actually has more of a pipeline to national and pro teams.

This complexity also impacts girls who might be recruited for a school with a women’s rugby program and how they might get any financial aid. NIRA schools that are part of NCAA Division I and II will have official scholarships. NIRA D3 relies on academic merit discounts but rugby can certainly play a role in a prospective student athlete’s chances of acceptance. For CRAA schools, the scholarship route is not an option but there may be admissions advantages and potentially even additional financial aid. 🤷‍♂️

To exemplify the NIRA/CRAA split: while Maher led Quinnipiac University to three consecutive NIRA titles, Olympic hero Alex Sedrick played for Life University in Georgia and she led her team to a CRAA championship final.

Are you ready for even more complexity? Life U recently has brokered a deal to allow the college squad to continue competing in a CRAA college division while also letting the team be part of USA Rugby’s WD1 open club division. 🤔

Over the last decade there has been a 300% increase in participation at the collegiate level for women.

And don’t panic, but as NIRA and CRAA jockey for the upper echelon, just below sits National Collegiate Rugby (NCR) which is neither sanctioned by USA Rugby nor is aspiring for NCAA championship status. Instead, it pulls the weight as the largest collegiate rugby org with some 300 women’s teams across the US and the foundation for club competition across 3 divisions with some 8,000 women players!

If we follow Maher back in time to her roots in Burlington, VT, we find her high school did not offer girl’s rugby so she found her way to a local club team and then on to Quinnipiac. Despite her fame, Burlington HS still doesn’t have a high school team…yet.

Across the US, however, youth rugby is on the rise. Girl participation has seen double digit year over year participation growth. In fact, the fall 2024 high school season was the first where registered girls surged past boys.

Youth rugby is overseen by USA Youth & High School Rugby (YHS) whose mission is to deliver a million youth players before the rugby world cups arrive stateside in 2031 and 2033. Their effort is supported by some 47 State Youth Rugby Organizations (SYROs). Currently, the states that are most robust include: California, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Utah, Ohio, Texas, Indiana, and Colorado.

High School age girls rugby is 6,000+ and growing. And that number grows in college to about 10,000.

Thoughtful work by non-profit Imagine Rugby which is endorsed as the sport’s entry point by USA Rugby and the professional men’s league Major League Rugby makes many resources available to young players with no-contact flag rugby. They tout some 500,000 kids having participated.

To recap, it may be messy, but youth rugby for girls is on the rise thanks to numerous governing bodies, non-profit initiatives, travel clubs, high schools, universities. The success of the USA’s Women’s Eagles and the magnetic pull of Maher point to a bright future. 😎

Want to know more about the basics? Here is a primer for rugby and some of the terminology.

No boom is without a good internet domain name! World Rugby started lobbying for “.rugby” back in 2012 and it became a reality in 2018.

Malcom Gladwell’s latest book Revenge of the Tipping Point has a theory that women’s rugby at Harvard is a “country club” sport and designed as an affirmative action for wealthy people. He discusses with Harvard alum Conan O’Brien. He may make this argument for tennis or other sports with higher price tags but rugby has a low $ entry point and not really played at any country clubs. 😂

Thank you for digging in!

Next week, we’ll try to define the market for “Youth Sports” 💰

PS. Following up from last week. Tung-Yuan LL from Chinese Taipei won the 2025 Little League World Series defeating Summerlin South LL from Las Vegas, NV completing an international championship sweep for the baseball divisions. Read our two part deep dive on Little League.