US Collegiate Rugby Membership By The Numbers

OK, Let's Get To It

First off, it's pretty clear, and has been for a while, that NCR dominates the D2 and Small-College categories. The only category where they don't have more players than some other organization is Women's D2.

CRAA/ACR D2 Women reported 2,628 players for the 2022-23 season. NCR reports 1,486. However, expect that balance to change in 2023-24 with the fact that CRAA/ACR conference Mid-Atlantic, and independent conference Carolinas are moving to NCR. 

NCR has 2,861 men's D2 players, 4,590 men's small-college players, and 2,050 women's small-college players. So overall, in D2 and Small-College, NCR reports just under 11,000 players. Outside NCR has about 3,500.

As reported by NIRA, there are 695 players registered in NIRA. CRAA's D1A and D1 Elite. For those divisions there was a little double-dipping but not much and it was fairly easy to track.

Overall there are 2,169 registered D1A players, and 219 D1 Elite players. Expect those numbers to increase slightly in 2023-24.

NCR's Men's D1 has 1,581 players and 852 in the Women's D1. But we're not comparing apples to apples here—it makes a bit more send for us to lump all the D1 and D1AA stuff together. NCR has just over 4,000 D1 and D1AA players, 80% of them men, while CRAA has about 5,000, over 40% of them women. ACR has 1,731 players, all men, and there are just under 2,000 players who members of USA Rugby and not of any over-arching organization. Those are split, as far as we can discern, about 56-44 between men and women.

Making Adjustments

About 150 men's players and about 150 women's players are on NCR roles simply because they played in the CRC—they were not NCR members for the rest of the year and so we'd list them as CRAA or ACR or NIRA or USAR Independent members.

Meanwhile, about 800 men's players were registered with USA Rugby but really played their regular season under NCR—they were USA Rugby members only because they wanted to play non-conference games with USA Rugby members. So we'd list those players under NCR.

We can't count those players (1,100 in all) twice. 

What We Came Up With

Here's are two tables, showing who is a member of what, men's and women's rugby, and also how many clubs.

Please remember that while these are based on official membership numbers submitted to GRR, they also include a few estimates. Those estimates don't account for any significant potential errors. We're confident these figures are close enough. 

Please note that the percentage is the percentage of players in that category, so the 53.1% USA Members under women means 53.1% of women rugby players are playing for USA Rugby member teams.

Percentages refer to the percentage of Men players or Women players under each category.

The number of teams is a bit of an estimate because in certain categories we had to make a guess. But if we're off we doubt we're off by more than 10. However, if an organization told us a number, that's what we went to (meaning, if you think it's inaccurate, take it up with them).

Not all men's D2 and Small College teams are in NCR ... almost all, but not all.

We categorized D1A and NCR D1 together (yes, we know some people aren't going to like that but overall this list represents the old D1A—called by us "Highest Men's Division" or HMD. HWD is Highest Women's Division and remains just the D1 Elite.