USA Rugby's President Nigel Melville : Blueprint For the Future

Article from EPRU.org:

Melville's priority is to establish rugby as a credible path to take.

Eighteen months ago former England scrum half Nigel Melville graduated from club rugby to the international game when he was given the task of revamping USA Rugby.

Melville's immediate concern at the time was to oversee the Eagles' assault on Rugby World Cup 2007, but the question of building for the future is what occupies most of his grey matter, most of the time.

There have been many strategies and plans put forward for revolutionising rugby in the United States, from converting hulking NFL rejects to harnessing the power and finesse of a thousand failed Olympic sprinters. Melville's priority is to establish rugby as a credible path to take.

'Once there's money on the table and contracts are available, people will come to the game, people will 'cross over', as they call it,' he told Total Rugby.

'And not necessarily just from football - we've had wrestlers on our all-American team recently, even a guy doing rodeo, a waterpolo player. People from different sports who are just recognising that rugby might be the right path for them and giving it a go.'

The chicken-and-egg irony of the situation is also not lost on Melville.

Catch-22

'Of course, it's Catch 22: we need the money and if we get the money we can get the athletes. If we get the athletes we can compete with anybody,' he said.

However, Melville has also seen enough of rugby in its traditional strongholds to know that throwing a rugby ball at a hundred proven atheletes will not lay a solid foundation for sustainable growth.

In order to possess an intuitive, innate understanding of the game players need to grow up with a rugby ball, not have one thrust upon them and arguably the biggest challenge Melville faces is to convince America's youth to play rugby early enough for them to make a real impact long term.

'When I got here and talked about 'Youth Rugby' I was talking about a totally different game,' he continued. 'I was talking about six, seven and eight-year-olds, and I have an eight-year-old and he was asking where the rugby is and there wasn't any rugby. They were talking the 'Youth Game' and talking about 15, 16, 17-year-olds and I was saying, 'well, I'm talking about the young kids here.'

'That's where you get your energy from, that's where the game gets its energy from. Then as they grow older, they get to the age of 11 or 12, other influences come in, they go to senior school, they make some choices - we just want to be one of those sports that they can make choices about.

'At the moment we seem to be chosen by those who are failed at something else and those different choices will only be made if we can drive the age group down. I'm doing a lot of work at the moment to create a base of 100,000 kids playing at six to 12 years of age, non-contact, great, fun rugby and realising that when they have a go they love it. That's the challenge over the next 12 months, we want 100,000 kids playing non-contact.'

If that can happen and then snowball in a country of America's size, it is clear that the potential for the sport can be enormous.

Driving the age group down

'We were in New Zealand recently with the all-American team, which is a college age team - some of them have only been playing rugby for two or three years - and physically when we played New Zealand Universities we were better than them,' said Melville.

'When it came down to the game they were smarter than us. They understood the game better, they could play the conditions better and we were somewhat lacking in that area.

'Had those kids been playing from six and seven years of age, we'd have been much better than them, and so that was great, that was encouraging. We just need to keep driving that age group down.'

Melville's immediate Eagles focus is these all-Americans. They are the players who, at 22 years of age, will be 25 or 26 by the time of the next World Cup. Behind them will come a next group of athletes who might be playing in High School now, and behind them the new generation X, the non-contact converts who first touched a ball at six or seven as part of his master plan.

'We have to create that breadth of foundation, and if we create that breadth we'll have a funnel going up and some players coming out of the top end.'