USA Men 11th at RWC 7s, Exposing Development Shortfall
USA Men 11th at RWC 7s, Exposing Development Shortfall
Up and down has been the story of the USA men's 7s team for some time now.
Head Coach Mike Friday has been trying for a while to get younger players and newer players into the fold, but it's fair to say it can't all be on him. If you have a team of seasoned veterans who are also some of the best in the world—Baker, Isles, Tomasin, Hughes, Pinkleman, Barrett, Iosefo, Niua—and they want to stay with you, how do you keep the other players around?
You have to constantly recycle the next generation as this group stays. Then they all leave at once—retirement, sabbatical, injury—and suddenly you have to replace more than half the team. OK, cool, you can handle some of that. Perry Baker and Stephen Tomasin are still around; Niua and Isles should be around at least some of the time; Joe Schroeder has emerged as a leader and a pretty good version of Pinkelman; Kevon Williams replaces Hughes and is star quality.
That's a group you can build around, right? And we saw flashes of that through the World Series, even up to beating the World Series leaders in the opening match of the LA Sevens—where the Eagles dominated the game. But with Isles taking time off, there wasn't a lot of depth on the team. Williams went down with an injury before LA and that was a blow. They could perhaps handle that. Then Schroeder did his leg. That hurt. The injuries kept coming, and the replacements were, generally, nowhere near as experienced at the international level.
So the Rugby World Cup 7s could hardly have come at a worse time. This team just isn't ready, and showed it against Samoa. They bounced back against Wales, but Wales isn't very good. Then they lost to Uruguay in a classic example of how a bunch of guys who know each other and play for each other and are physical and have nothing to lose can still win rugby games. Uruguay, for their part, had their best RWC 7s ever.
And then against Kenya, the Eagles somehow put things together. At their best Kenya is way, way better than Uruguay, but they have a tendency to slip up at certain moments. In this game it was back and forth and Kenya seemed to be in the driver's seat before Lucas Lacamp scored a brilliant long-range try.
And then it was a case of ... oh, wait ... what if, instead of diddling around with the ball until everyone knows we're going to pass to Baker and then giving him the ball with no space, we commit some defenders and then ship it quickly to Baker? How about that? Admittedly it was less thought-out the first time—Tomasin just skipped the middle man, said "screw it" and launched a wide skip pass to his longtime teammate for the try. Baker then got the ball in space again and that try, considering Kenya scored again late, won the Americans 11th.
Finishing 11th is a) not fun and b) kind of expected. This is not a team at its peak. This is a team that needs time.
The USA U23 team that finished 2nd at RugbyTown 7s shows great promise, as do the younger players already in the USA system or who performed well for other teams at RugbyTown or the Club Championships. The hope is that the Golden Eagles booster group that was in Cape Town watching the USA understands how important it is to get those players in a workable professional setup as soon as possible. Not one of the players in Cape Town should feel comfortable about their place, and that is only accomplished if the next group is at Chula Vista all the time testing them, and that next group can play in tournaments and lose and get beaten up. The USA Falcons should be playing not only in LA but Dubai and Amsterdam and New York and Rosslyn Park and Middlesex and Melrose and Barcelona. They should be traveling and competing at least as often as the Ramlbin' Jesters or similar teams.
Friday has spoken frequently about how COVID shut down his recruiting efforts. A less charitable observer might call that making excuses, but he's not wrong. He has been trying to funnel young players into the system. But the thing it, he needed more than he has to find the right ones. And those players can't just train at Chula Vista and watch the starters on TV. They need to play, too.
