I have moved on from club rugby. I don’t report on it. I report on high school and college rugby. One of the reasons I have done that is because I have tired of club rugby’s acceptance of mediocrity.

There are good teams in club rugby, sometimes good for a long period. But they’re not doing all they can to develop young American players. The competition is not tough enough, and hasn’t been for several years, now (I said this four years ago, and four years before that). 

Whether we actually launch a professional league or not is immaterial. We need to find a group of people who are committed to taking young American rugby players and giving them tough, concentrated rugby games on a regular basis. Focusing our All American programs on training and camps may work in some ways, but there’s no substitute for playing.

This has been a problem for a long time. It’s a problem in that clubs look for the quick payoff and get some experienced overseas guy to fill in rather than work with an American college graduate - this is especially true at scrumhalf, flyhalf, and hooker.

Now the ongoing story is that USA Rugby, and specifically Nigel Melville, undercut and destroyed the Super League and any real attempts to form a national league. However, the clubs themselves were even more culpable here, allowing petty politics to get in the way of creating a national league that would funnel the best players to the best competition. And this includes the clubs on the second level, where any attempt to allow players to move up and down as in a minor-league/major-league system were rebuffed.

I interviewed Samu Manoa this summer and he said he didn’t take rugby seriously until he moved to Northampton. Even in the Super League, where he was the best player and led SFGG to a championship, he took it easy. That’s not exactly an endorsement of the rigors of American club rugby.

College rugby is only a little better, but the split of fall v spring and the split of Varsity Cup and DIA is not helping. America’s collegiate competition is almost unique in how important it is to the development of young rugby players, and yet within that system we don’t always have the best teams playing each other.

(This is not the time to go on a rant about the competitive house of cards that is the Varsity Cup, but suffice to say it’s a competitive house of cards.)

In Boulder we’ve got a new Performance Director, and working the pipeline of players has been an up and down experience at USA Rugby. Sometimes it’s not their fault (people move). Sometimes it is (lack of a coherent pathway to the national team that a) doesn’t put it all on the coach’s shoulders and b) all players know about and understand and buy in to). 

The most egregious problem is that there hasn’t been a major select-side competition in the United States since 2007. And given that the game is amateur here, and we don’t have a national league, so we can’t be sure that all of the best players play where we expect them to play. That’s why you need a select-side competition, and you need one endorsed and funded by USA Rugby. A pro league? Yeah, that’s nice. Let’s see how many USA-eligible flyhalves will play. If it’s more than 30% I will be shocked.

And as for selections, as I said, I think Tolkin goes too safe at times (and World Cup time is when lots of USA coaches have gone safe). But I also think many coaches have a tendency to latch onto the negatives of a well-known player, and embrace the positives of one who is not known (better the devil you don’t know in this case).  

Going forward, then, I think we’ve got a real opportunity with the new Six Nations competition to give more USA players high-level experience. I just don’t want those opportunities to go to longtime club guys who aren’t going to get appreciably better. 

If there’s a pro league, let’s hope it’s not just to give C-list overseas players an excuse to move to the USA.

USA Rugby Performance Director Alex Magleby knows he’s got to find athletes with height, halfbacks, and hookers, and nurture them. It’s the nursing part that I wonder about. What is being done to make sure that Hanco Germyshuys, Ben Cima, Liam Jimmons, George Fotu, Alec Gletzer et al are in a good playing situation, and know that USA Rugby is watching and helping?