How can USA Rugby solve its ongoing talent drought crisis?

In recent years there has been an ongoing drought of homegrown American talent coming through and reaching the highest level of professional rugby.

33 homegrown American internationals (by my count) have played in rugby's highest level domestic professional leagues (Premiership, URC, Top 14, Super Rugby) and as you can see on this graph 17 of those were born in the 1980s (as overseas recruitment became bigger in France) but dropped down to 8 players born in the 1990s. None as yet born in 2000s have won a contract to play abroad at the elite level domestically. 

Of the four more recent ones born 1995-99. Titi Lamositele quit USA rugby in a major betrayal of his home country. Roman Salanoa is staying uncapped in the Irish system. Leaving David Ainuu and Ruben de Haas (who now plays Currie Cup for the Cheetahs) as the only two homegrown players committed to the Eagles who have experience at the elite level.

You may also note a theme among those players. Of the few top homegrown American players to have broken through overwhelmingly most have tended to be either from the Polynesian-American immigrant community who carried over a rugby tradition with them or someone like De Haas who comes from a rugby family from South Africa.

Polynesian-Americans are just 0.5% of the general USA population but increasingly the only demographic in America that can produce a top level player. Four of the top five homegrown Americans (Samu Manoa, Joe Taufete'e, Lamositele, Ainuu) of the past decade or so have been Polynesians. They also are about 28% of the homegrown American players in MLR.

Toulouse prop David Ainuu is currently the only homegrown
Eagles player who has become established at rugby's highest levels

The drought is also reflected in the make up of the current national team. For example in the game against Romania this year the Eagles had 9 of the starting XV and 13 of the matchday 23 raised overseas. Around 31% of the players in MLR eligible for USA were ones raised and mostly trained overseas and 37% of the USA eligible starts.

Homegrown American men's rugby 15s players of a top class level have become rare, but especially so of a non-Polynesian background, such as the likes Dan Lyle, Blaine Scully, Paul Emerick, Scott LaValla, Dave Hodges has stopped breaking through. Meanwhile, whilst Perry Baker and Carlin Isles have excelled brilliantly in 7s, USA Rugby has never in its history had an African-American make a significant and lengthy career in 15s, despite the exceptional athletic talent and dominance in the NFL or basketball of this demographic.

This talent drought ultimately is the chief factor behind USA's reduced competitiveness over the last five years. New homegrown talent simply just did not emerge in sufficient quantity or quality over the last cycle to keep up with rivals. In 2022 when USA faced Portugal in the final RWC qualifier it was obvious that the Lobos with Raffaele Storti, Rodrigo Marta, Jerónimo Portela, José Madeira from their improving junior setup supplemented by experienced French Pro D2 veterans were a team on the up, whereas the Eagles were on the way down.

Uruguay, Chile, then Portugal eliminated USA for the first ever
time from a 20 team RWC as the Eagles trended downwards over
the four year cycle with few new top level talents breaking through 

Now with 7 years to go until the USA hosts its home World Cup in 2031 this talent drought is starting to become a crisis ....

At present things do not look hopeful. USA cannot hope to lift their ranking significantly just on whatever eligible leftover scraps they can find discarded from "Tier 1" countries.

This might sound harsh to the individual players, and mean no disrespect to those trying their best, but the blunt truth is USA is not going to reach top 12 as one of the best "Tier 2" and will struggle to reach even top 16 basing the core segment of the squad around players who were only ever at the very edges of professional club squads in "Tier 1" countries.

Irishmen who didn't make one of the provinces like Paul Mullen, Paddy Ryan, Luke Carty, a Shute Shield prop like Jake Turnbull, or even a discarded Tier 1 international from Italy like Tommaso Boni, does not compare favourably to the ex-All Blacks and Super Rugby talent Samoa can draft in for World Cups. Nor does it compare favourably to Georgia whose world top 10 U20s are producing Top 14 and Pro D2 quality players every year.

Nor is it realistic for MLR to attract uncapped Super Rugby talent of the calibre that Scotland, Ireland, or even Japan can to qualify on 5 year residency (if they were to try this they'd have to start within a couple of years for it to be eligible by 2031).

There was a bit of hope in the U20s reaching the U20 Trophy final for the first time in 12 years. But after watching a final so one sided against Scotland where they barely entered the opponent 22, and the best team they beat at the tournament Uruguay ship 73 points to Japan, it sadly just looked like those seemingly good results may have been more the product of level of the event being dismally disappointing this year than anything to get excited about.

The one sidedness of the U20 Trophy final vs Scotland where the
USA lost 8 lineouts and barely entered the opponents 22, whilst the
best side they beat at the tournament shipped 73 points to Japan, quickly
extinguished much of the initial optimism over their pool stage results.

So can anything be done to end this homegrown talent drought?

Unfortunately there are no easy answers, it may well be just that USA Rugby is doomed to never being able to produce a side capable of seriously competing at the highest level.

Head coach Scott Lawrence talked of a "Moonshot 2031" project of reaching the RWC semi finals, which whilst low on actual ideas, and a target set perhaps delusionally high even for a best possible case scenario, it is correct in principle that for the Eagles to get a stronger more competitive team by 2031 it will take some unique, imaginative, and out of the box thinking towards how to identify talent and nurture late starters to becoming world class players.

The problem is of course the American Football (a distant cousin of rugby) fills a similar team contact sport niche and college football is going to take tens of thousands of the best athletes between the ages of 18-23. Nearly all the elite superstar athletes in rugby would be playing college football if they were American.

To state the obvious rugby cannot compete with American College football. It cannot ever hope for an huge elite athlete capable of NFL like junior club rugby player Haloti Ngata to have a future in the sport. For junior players who don't reach NFL, the best USA Rugby can hope for is to get them back around age 23-24.

Before wrecking NFL offenses, @Haloti_Ngata92 was a BEAST on the rugby pitch. 😤 pic.twitter.com/g8OPecN5Zh

— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) May 29, 2019

This leads to the topic of the "crossover player", a phrase that has become so commonly referenced with discussions of USA rugby that "xo player" has become the shorthand for it. This idea is a lot easier said than done, but as so much of the best rugby suitable talent gets sucked up by big college sports, it is hard to come up with great alternatives.

It is very uncommon but there have been a handful of rare instances of late starters crossing over to rugby in their 20s and having decent professional level careers:

• Dan Lyle was a college footballer who took up rugby age 23 to stay fit, became a full international in about a year, and went on to become the leading USA player of his era, most notably starring for Bath for a number of years and was a key player for them in winning the European Cup in 1998.
• Luke Gross switched from basketball age 24, became a full international in about 3 years, played for a number of different professional clubs in Europe, and is still the most capped lock in USA rugby history.
• Kevin Tkachuk switched from wrestling and gridiron around age 20 and became a full international in about four years, eventually going on to captain Canada, and play over 150 professional games for Glasgow. 
• Jérôme Thion switched from basketball age 20 and was playing at the top level in France only in about a season, made his international debut in about 5 years, and went on to win 54 caps including two World Cups.
• Scott MacLeod started social rugby age 20 having previously been focused on golf and basketball and in a couple years became a professional and in 5 years made his international debut and stayed pro for 13 seasons at various clubs.
• Tom Court switched from shot put age 24 and was playing Super Rugby for the Reds within a couple of years and went on to a solid career for Ulster and Ireland that included World Cups and European Cup finals.
• Andrei Ursache was a lumberjack, who after being convinced to start playing age 22 by his younger brother Valentin who was already by then a fully capped Romanian international, went on to become a fully capped international himself and have a highly durable 10 season 218 match Pro D2 career. 
• Hayden Smith moved to the USA from Australia on a basketball scholarship and only took up rugby near the end of college age 23, unbelievably made the Eagles team within just 2 months (likely a record), and then got signed to play professionally with Saracens about a month later, then after playing the 2011 World Cup, went to American Football and after just 6 months made an active NFL roster playing 5 times for the New York Jets in November-December 2012, before returning to rugby a year later after getting released.
• Beka Gigashvili comes from a wrestling background and had never even watched a rugby match until he was aged 20, but won a lower league pro contract in France within 3 years, and within 3 more years was playing Top 14.
• Kirill Gotovtsev was a top wrestler only narrowly outside the Russian national squad, then switched to bobsleigh, and had not even watched a match of rugby aged 25 when he switched to the sport, he became a Russian international in 3 years, and now plays in the Premiership for Gloucester as possibly the oldest starter to rugby to make a career at the elite professional level.

Dan Lyle CNN interview in 1999 as one of the most successful ever

professional rugby players to have only started the sport in his 20s

To some extent the small number of examples likely just reflects the fact that there is a tiny number of athletes who have ever seriously even attempt to crossover and become professional men's rugby 15s players starting in their 20s as no organised equivalent of the NFL international player pathway exists in rugby. Most of the names mentioned above are just peculiar examples of players who stumbled into rugby by chance.

Intriguingly, whilst most athletes converting to 7s in their 20s like Perry Baker or Carlin Isles have been players known for out and out pace (neither of whom made serious efforts to try and make it in 15s), virtually all the 15s players who took up the sport in their 20s and reached a high professional level appear to be forwards especially in the tight five.

There are quite a few who switched as late teenagers, the finest example Chris Latham, who was a soccer player and did not play rugby until age 18 but went on to become at his peak a World XV level full back. One of USA's best players of the 2010s Blaine Scully switched around a similar sort of age from water polo. But after age 18 examples of crossovers become very rare and almost non-existent for backs. Soso Matiashvili converted from downhill skiing in his 20s to make Georgia's World Cup squad in 2019 but that is not really a top level player.

So it seems to suggest it is more plausible USA could build a competitive pack with crossover athletes (incidentally both the post-college crossovers to rugby in the Eagles team right now in prop Pono Davis and flanker Cory Daniel are forwards) but developing backs may be trickier.

Ex-wrestler Cory Daniel is the arguably the most successful
of the crossover athletes currently in MLR with him breaking
the league's tackle record and breaking into the Eagles setup

However to try and harness crossover athletes more effectively USA Rugby will need to scale up the recruitment of them (and not just from American Football, but basketball, wrestling, track and field, maybe even something like swimming), broadening out and professionalising their talent scouting team to cover as much of the country as possible to truly get as close to leaving no stone unturned as they can get, discover innovative training methods specifically geared towards later starters, and tactical ploys to best emphasise strengths and hide weaknesses, but also simply restructuring the rugby calendar.

USA always have in general had more later starters to rugby compared to most of other teams in the world. The challenge is to find ways of playing catch up with the global competition. To have the best chance of success of this, not just for rookie crossover athletes, but returnees to rugby who played football at college, or players who took up rugby only at college, the USA rugby ecosystem needs to organise a LOT more games to feed MLR.

You can't expect MLR to feature loads of inexperienced players all at once straight into their starting teams without it risking devaluing the credibility and standard of the competition for those Americans who aren't rookies and are at a more advanced stage of development.

A possible example of this is with the MLR's convert from the New England Patriots in the NFL Cassh Maluia, who despite hearing from teammates who have said confidently that he has potential to be "massive" in the sport, is at age 26 after 18 months in the sport making just two starts in a season for the Chicago Hounds.

Every player develops at their own individual speed, but there is not huge amount of time for these crossovers to learn the game, if they are to have Eagles careers work needs to be done to try and accelerate their trajectory (although it may actually be the case that emphasis on stamina in American Football is so low that the large conditioning adjustment required may make that transition somewhat more prolonged than from other sports).

Cassh Maluia formerly of New England Patriots in the NFL is said to
have big potential in rugby but so far has not made a big impact in MLR 

These players playing catch up in development need bigger schedules at an appropriate feeder development level to the relatively short MLR season. Something equivalent to what New Zealand's NPC is to a similar length Super Rugby season.

One idea would be something like a MLR trophy competition some time either in the Autumn window or as a much more extended pre-season competition very early in the year, to give more game time for the best American players and prospects outside the international squad.

This would both allow players to gain experience, and allow MLR coaches more of a window to fully assess and evaluate players so they can have more confidence in selecting those who show potential to be MLR starters rather than take the risk of throwing very raw inexperienced talent and unknown quantities right into an MLR starting lineup.

Unfortunately though, all this and probably any other proposed solution to the talent drought, would take quite a bit of money and far from guaranteed success. So it depends on how desperate World Rugby are to try and alleviate the USA talent drought as they would probably need to foot a lot of the bill. It is worth noting though there is reasonable criticism for every extra bit of effort WR put specifically into the USA, the more other "Tier 2" rivals could make the justifiable accusations of favouritism and what is supposed to be a neutral global governing body unfairly trying to pick and choose its preferred winners.

One thing would strongly caution USA Rugby not to do though is follow the typical rugby fan anti-foreigner narrative of scapegoating overseas recruitment for the American talent drought.

The high number of foreign players starting in MLR (about 70% of the starters were raised overseas outside of USA or Canada and about 54% of starters not eligible) are not to blame for USA's current struggle to produce top level homegrown talent they are starting because North America is a long way off producing top level homegrown talent to fill 12 teams.

In particular nearly all the fly halves in MLR being foreign raised is not to blame for North America struggling to produce a top level homegrown 10, this position mostly foreign raised because North America (and "Tier 2" nations in general) notoriously struggle to produce competent top level homegrown 10s.

It is important to get this the right way round, as if not, then it could lead to needlessly strict anti-foreigner policies being put in place in MLR that would devalue and degrade the high performance environment and competitive standards for the very best Americans to play in (and usually for the benefit only of players of irrelevance to international rugby).

Once you have enough game time for maybe the best 40-60 best eligible players likely to be relevant at one time to the national team after that the league's aspiration should be for it to be as high a level environment as possible to replicate test rugby, and in context of North American rugby that includes welcoming a sizeable contingent of foreign players (an alternative is culling teams to condense the talent but reducing the opportunities of players to make money and killing off local fanbases for teams should be frowned upon as both anti-player and anti-fan). The challenge is to develop more Americans for a higher standard competition not to reduce the standard of that competition.

Anyway whatever ideas USA Rugby comes up with, quite clearly the Eagles in their current state are going nowhere, and they need to try something drastic to end the homegrown talent drought crisis. To be ready to be competitive by 2031 some urgent drastic action and innovation is required and it needs to happen soon within the next couple of years.