With all the talk about how USA Rugby, and the different groups within American rugby, are changing, and especially with the rarely-discussed issues of insurance, liability, and a global pandemic, it’s reasonable for people to find themselves scrambling for answers.

There are experts, industry veterans, and people who sat next to an insurance broker on an airplane that one time who all have opinions. And it’s not just about regular old liability insurance or injury insurance, or whether you can get the cheapest rate for your team, league, organization, or USA Rugby as a whole.

It’s also about navigating the ever-changing world of regulations, standards, and protecting coaches, players, referees, and administrators—not to mention the complications posed by COVID-19.

Swimming in this strong current of the sports insurance world is a rugby guy. Chris Pesigan is a co-founder at Players Health, and a former rugby player at the University of Notre Dame.

See More At https://playershealth.com/

Players Health started from the experiences of founder and CEO Tyrre Burks, Pesigan as his co-founder, and other members of the company in playing college, recreational, and professional sports. Burks played football at Winona State, while Pesigan was a rugby player throughout high school and at the University of Notre Dame. Pesigan has been a rugby player for the last 12 years playing for the St. Louis Druids (now St. Louis University High School), University of Notre Dame in college, and the Krakens Men's Team from Lake Michigan. Over the past couple of years, the passion Burks and Pesigan have for making sports safer for youth athletes blossomed into a growing tech company.

The business operates through a series of apps built to improve the health and safety of youth athletes. They created technology applications to assist in abuse prevention and reporting, injury management, and insurance reducing the administrative burden for sports organizations. 

The abuse app allows for athletes to report abuse (emotional, physical, sexual) anonymously or privately and assists Safe Sport Act compliance streamlining background checks, abuse training, and a dashboard to monitor it all from the top down. The injury app allows for monitoring return to play concussion protocol and real time analytics on injuries and the insurance side of the business is focused on giving insurance access to all sports and rugby organizations at a reasonable rate.

“We’re providing a full solution,” Pesigan told Goff Rugby Report. “It's about awareness training, and getting in front of the issues such as abuse and COVID. Insurance is a piece of it, but the business model is centered around risk management. We provide all the tools of risk management.”

Players Health is working with organizations such as Illinois Youth Soccer, Kentucky Youth Soccer, Football Canada, and Water Ski Wakeboard Canada, and many other sports organizations across the United States and Canada. The PH Protect application allows the members of these organizations to report abuse or misconduct, participate in abuse awareness and prevention training, conduct background screenings and more. Player’s Health technology allows sports administrators to understand and assess their risk at any time, with the goal of improving it for the safety of their athletes and staff members.

Clients pay for these services, but those services can pay off in the long run.

“By managing injury and abuse risk, and doing it in a platform that can be monitored and can show people where they can improve, we can find competitive insurance rates for our clients,” explained Pesigan. “Because we provide clients with an assessment of where they are and how they can achieve compliance, we can show insurance carriers that we are helping our clients mitigate risk. Fewer claims and better risk management leads to lower insurance rates.”

The app can even help players with injury rehab, which also helps lower claims.

Of course, this leads us to discuss USA Rugby and its issues. Since the landscape is getting more complicated, it may well help everyone, from coaches to league administrators, to have technological tools to figure out what the heck’s going on.

Pesigan, wisely, demurred on discussing USA Rugby’s issues, but he did say he remains a huge rugby fan and believes that there is the greatest opportunity to grow the game.

Can an app help with that? Maybe.