Recruitment Camp Searches for that Isles Feeling
Recruitment Camp Searches for that Isles Feeling
Former trackster Carlin Isles is now a rugby star. Can USA Rugby find more? Ian Muir photo.
USA Rugby’s first Recruitment Camp starts up Saturday.
This is sort of a combine, and sort of an open casting call, although it’s not entirely a combine and not completely open, either. What it is, then, is a chance for potentially overlooked or forgotten players, and players who are new to the game, to get a look in front of USA coaches and experts at Chula Vista to see if they might help the USA men’s 7s team.
USA Rugby 7s HP Director Alex Magleby hesitated to use the term combine, because it’s not just about measuring vertical leap and speed.
“The predictability value of the NFL combine is actually very, very low,” Magleby told Goff Rugby Report. “We will do some physical measurements. But we will also get them into things that will show whether the athlete will be a good rugby player over time.”
That might be related to coachability, or skills under pressure, or the ability to see the field.
The typical athlete who is attending (and they had to apply and get through a screening process to be accepted) doesn’t follow any one typical profile. Some are longtime club guys who think they have been overlooked - some of these have been playing with the Olympic Development Academies. Some are college players who play for low-profile colleges, and who see Martin Iosefo of the University of Montana succeed and figure they can get there, too. Some are former HS All Americans or U20 players who fell off the radar. And some just picked up a rugby ball a few weeks ago - football players and track athletes who are thinking of making the switch.
“We’ don’t know exactly how they will pan out,” said Magleby. “This recruitment camp specifically is a beta test.”
Magleby said he thinks players will fall into one of four categories.
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Meanwhile, the USA program is looking to recruit players from other sports, just as USA Women’s 7s Coach Ric Suggitt has been doing. The 7s team has developed a solid relationship with the track program at Chula Vista, and we might see some more track athletes of different types check out rugby. First priority for USA Track & Field, of course, is to put together the very best squad for Rio 2016. But as we’ve seen, a sprinter not quick enough to get close to the Olympic team can find international acclaim in 7s rugby. (That would be a reference to Carlin Isles.)
Among the players potentially to make a crossover is Andrew Hawkins, who is a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns (where former Gonzaga HS standout Johnson Bademosi plays). Hawkins provided some quotes for USA Rugby’s promotion of the recruitment camp, as did former USA U20 fullback Nate Ebner (now with the New England Patriots), and former Green Bay great Ahman Green, who has been in some rugby camps through the years and should be in this one, too.
But it may well be that the next big thing is an athlete, football, or rugby, we have not heard of.
