U.S. rugby needs more players. The answer could lie in basketball

Gary Gold was sitting courtside at Crypto.com Arena in February 2022 when he had an epiphany.

The South African was taking a break from his duties as head coach of the United States men’s rugby union team. The Rugby World Cup was 18 months away, and the pressure of turning one of the sport’s sleeping giants into a side capable of reaching the quarter-finals was starting to pinch. Gold, a lifelong basketball fan who grew up following Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, was living out a childhood fantasy.

“I spent a stupid amount of money on that ticket,” he says. “I was drinking it all in when suddenly I had this thought. Watching guys like LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo move, the way they’d catch and release the ball, I couldn’t help but wonder what they’d look like on a rugby field. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became in my theory that basketball players would make excellent rugby players.”

For years, the accepted wisdom has been that American rugby should mine the NFL for talent. The parallel is straightforward enough: big athletes with explosive power who are accustomed to violent collisions. Yet, Gold didn’t buy into it.

“The narrative is always football, football, football,” he says. “It never landed with me. They’re incredible athletes, sure, but they’re one-dimensional.”

American football is specialised in a way rugby is not. Players spend entire careers attacking or defending, rarely both. Some scarcely touch the ball. Rugby asks for something different. Every player must handle, pass, tackle, run and make decisions in open play. Basketball, Gold realised, already teaches much of that.

“Basketball players understand transition because the whole game is about transition,” he says. “Getting the ball, losing the ball, attacking space, defending space. Their footwork, their dexterity, their ability to pass. What more do basketball players understand better than space?”

Gold realises that convincing the next LeBron James to switch codes is unrealistic. That ship sailed before it ever left the harbour. Gold, who left his post after the Eagles failed to qualify for the 2023 World Cup, believes that USA Rugby would be well served targeting everyone else.

Each year, more than 19,000 men compete across NCAA basketball . Only a tiny fraction will ever reach the NBA. America produces an extraordinary volume of tall, coordinated, highly skilled athletes who eventually discover there is no professional future waiting for them. Gold’s question is simple: Why isn’t rugby finding them first?

David Hodges has been asking himself the same question. The former U.S. captain, who represented his country 54 times before transitioning to a high-performance coaching role in 2004, argues that they cannot simply borrow the development model of South Africa, New Zealand or England. The sporting landscapes are fundamentally different.

“We’ve always taken a rugby approach to making rugby players,” he says. “That isn’t necessarily the American approach.”

In countries where  rugby sits close to the top of the sporting food chain , the best young athletes often find their way into the game naturally. In America, they are dispersed across basketball, football, baseball, wrestling and several other sports long before rugby enters the conversation. Waiting for fully formed rugby players, Hodges believes, is waiting for something that rarely exists. “We don’t have the depth,” he says.

That is particularly true for specific positions such as lock forward, traditionally the physical engine room of a rugby team — providing pushing power in the scrum and height in a lineout. “Big guys just aren’t drawn to the sport,” Hodges adds.

Much of this thinking has already filtered into the women’s pathway. Irene Gardner, USA Rugby’s women’s sevens pathway coach, says basketball has become one of the sports they actively monitor during talent identification. At a recent pathway camp, eight of the 27 athletes came from basketball backgrounds, while Olympic bronze medallist Stephanie Rovetti only picked up rugby after playing Division I basketball.

“The use of both hands in dribbling helps when learning passing in rugby,” Gardner explains. “Receiving passes and going to get rebounds helps develop hand-eye coordination and an early catch skill in rugby. They’re also really good under high balls and in the lineout because they’re used to meeting the ball above their heads. The more I see basketball converts play rugby, the more similar the sports appear.”

Kristin Zdanczewicz, USA Rugby’s lead performance coach for the women’s pathway, reaches the same conclusion from a physiological perspective. Acceleration, deceleration, repeated sprint ability, reactive agility, lower-body power, coordination, balance; these athletic qualities are already present. The challenge is layering rugby-specific skills on top.

Luke Gross understands the theory better than most because he lived it. Long before he won 62 caps for the Eagles between 1996 and 2003 and was part of the U.S. squad at three Rugby World Cups, Gross was a 6ft 9in (206cm) basketball player at Marshall University who had barely heard of rugby. He stumbled across the sport as a 24-year-old after renting rooms in his house to members of the university team. “I was a confused rugby player playing basketball,” he laughs.

Looking back, the signs were there. Gross wasn’t a prolific scorer. He describes himself as “a banger,” happier doing the dirty work than filling up the points column. He also happened to hold Marshall’s single-season record for fouls, a statistic that perhaps made the transition to rugby less surprising than it first appears.

His first serious coach, the legendary Jack Clark, recognised that he was dealing with an athlete rather than a rugby player. Rather than overwhelm Gross with systems and set plays, Clark simplified everything.

“He put me in a box,” says Gross, who represented elite clubs in England, Wales and Ita...

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