The Collegiate Rugby Championships – magnificent sevens in Maryland
In Boyds this weekend, 2,300 men and women across 144 teams will play 300 games in eight divisions, in a tournament in its 15th year. Wade Smith will help make it work
Around the rugby world, most people who discover the game discover it young: in the womb if mum or dad played, as a kid if a sibling catches it first. In the US, until recently most people who picked up rugby picked it up in college, where it was long the “sport of the outsider, the eccentric, the nonconformist”, as some bloke wrote. These days, more high schools play, and more colleges play seriously, and that’s all to the good.
Wade Smith knows this as well as anyone. He’s chief operating officer of National Collegiate Rugby, which from Friday to Sunday will stage the Collegiate Rugby Championships at the Maryland Soccerplex in Boyds, north of Washington DC.
In its 15th year, the CRCs will welcome 80 men’s teams and 64 women’s teams across eight divisions to play 300 games of sevens, the men’s event culminating on Saturday, the women’s on Sunday. NCR says it’s the biggest collegiate rugby tournament in the world.
Pat Clifton presents The College Rugby Show:
I spoke to Wade after he landed in DC. To explain my intro here, I opened with a question I often use: what’s your rugby story?
“I actually was not a rugby player,” Wade said. “I grew up playing soccer and basketball primarily, but I lived overseas in Australia for a long time, and I became a really big rugby fan. And then after moving back here to the US, I got connected to college rugby, and it's just a really exciting area to work in because rugby is in my view really on the move in colleges.”
Smith lived in Sydney for 12 years. I’ve been to Sydney – once, 24 years ago, for a Lions tour – and it smelled of sun, salt, eucalyptus, beer, and rugby. Oddly enough, I liked it. I’ve also read and re-read Clive James on growing up there, and playing rugby, so I nodded sagely (for reasons connected to the great Reg Gasnier), when Wade told me he watched a lot of union Down Under but came to love league too.
Wade has “been working with National Collegiate Rugby for about five years, initially as a consultant. National Collegiate Rugby has been around for about 18 years. It started as National Small College Rugby, and five years ago we rebranded and expanded the organization's mission to support all divisions across men's and women's rugby.”
At that point I tried to describe a conversation about five years ago in which the great Matt McCarthy, of Rugby Wrap Up, spent a slightly hair-raising drive from West Point back to Manhattan wrestling with his stick-shift – and sometimes his car too – while attempting to explain college rugby and its rather byzantine structure.
“Matt's going to be one of our PA guys this weekend,” Wade said, which figured, as did Wade’s explanation of how NCR now “serves about 85% of the schools across the country, and … most schools align with our organization and our championship pathways.”
Which led to a slightly awkward question, about schools that don’t align and are not at the CRCs, those of the College Rugby Association of America (CRAA), including D1A teams that have been playing men’s and women’s 15s this spring, among them Army, who I know most about, and Cal Berkeley and Life, through to the men’s national championship in Indianapolis next week.
“Many of those schools are on the West Coast,” Wade said. “I'm from California, so I can say this, but Californians like to play rugby in the winter, which is … [not] when most schools across the country are able to play rugby. Schools in the north-east and upper Midwest are unable to play rugby in the wintertime. So you'll find that most schools around the country focus on the regular-season 15s in the fall, with a late-fall national championship, and then most schools around the country focus on rugby sevens in the spring.”
There’s definitely a split. As usual, I feel queasy even touching on the politics of it all, because I don’t really understand it and also because as the great Steve “The Lizard” Lewis has so kindly observed, I might be a big lump but I’m also a bit of a naif, and really just want everyone to get together and play.
Diplomatically, Wade said NCR was “open to all schools around the country. And further consolidation of college rugby, I think, is good for the sport. It makes our sport easier to follow. It helps us grow the fanbase. And we've seen over the last few years that there has been more alignment around one consistent schedule.”
How to get everyone working towards the same goal … is an age-old rugby question, ever lacking an answer. So, never mind: this weekend the spotlight is on the CRC. Multiple qualification events are done, the teams are set, and each division will feature “cascading brackets”: no pool play, straight knockouts, losing teams dropping into consolation play-offs. The defending champions in the Premier Cup – the top-level tournament – are Wheeling (from West Virginia, men) and Brown (from Rhode Island, women).
Wade had a lot to get on with, as “2,300 athletes [and] about 150 volunteers, not counting the youth players who will help us with the ball running” descended on Maryland, not to mention coaches and referees. Before letting him go, I asked about the CRC Hall of Fame.
Last year’s first class included the late John Prusmack, who founded the tournament and saw it thrive, and his wife, Patti Prusmack, and Nate Ebner, the Ohio State star turned Super Bowl winner and rugby Olympian, alongside players from past events.
Wade discussed 2025 inductees including Nicole Strasko, captain of Life when they won in 2016; Alex Magleby, CEO of the New England Free Jacks in MLR, coach for Dartmouth’s CRC wins in 2011 and 2012; and Kevon Williams, US men’s captain at the Paris Olympics, a double CRCs D3 champion with New Mexico Highlands.
Williams will appear at the tournament this weekend, alongside fellow Olympians Naya Tapper and Perry Baker. It all takes place not far north of DC – those unable to make it can watch on The Rugby Network and YouTube.
Further reading:
A Jon Prusmack: Rugby Sevens' Johnny Appleseed, Peter D Kramer, The Journal News
Perry Baker might be the best American rugby player of all time – right now, he just needs a job, MP, Guardian
At School with Reg Gasnier, Clive James