Taking coals to Newcastle – idiom; prov: to do something supposedly unnecessary; orig: Newcastle – an English town from which coal was shipped to other parts of England

You might say it's an unlikely story – a bunch of Americans introducing rugby to British schools. But then, you probably haven't met its author.

Mark Griffin founded Play Rugby USA, a ground-breaking non-profit that uses rugby as an educational tool to help disadvantaged children in New York, Los Angeles and beyond, in 2005. Such has been its success that Griffin has now set up a British offshoot, R4UK, to further his pursuit of "a better world through rugby" by working with boys and girls in inner-city London. Asked how he came to make such a move, Griffin raises an eyebrow.

"I thought surely something similar to our thing would exist in London," he says, "but it didn't. But all the risk factors for the kids there are exactly the same as they are here. It's exactly the same programme."

It took a chance meeting at the 2010 Churchill Cup, with Terry Burwell, a former competitions director of the Rugby Football Union who had spotted a gap in his home market, for Play Rugby USA to take the wholly unlikely step of exporting its educational mission to the UK. After all, according to tradition if not incontrovertible historical fact, rugby was invented in Britain, at the school that gives the game its name.

America being rather less open to British tradition than other parts of the globe that were once shaded pink, Play Rugby USA, obvious to say, is the product of conditions a world away from the manicured playing fields of Rugby School. But rugby is nonetheless on the rise in the States and Griffin can cite a survey by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association to back-up his statement that "rugby is the fastest growing team sport in America". His success is behind a large part of that growth.

Play Rugby USA takes rugby, predominantly in its seven-a-side form and using tag rules rather than tackles, into schools in areas such as Queens and the Bronx in New York and Bell Gardens in Los Angeles. Coaches, youth development mentors and accredited teachers then use the game on the field and in the classroom, to teach the virtues of teamwork, co-operation, dedication and perspiration. Activities are run in school hours and after, keeping kids off the streets and providing valuable opportunities for supervised exercise.

Despite some impressive achievements – including staging the annual New York Rugby Cup and sending scholarship-winning pupils to New Zealand to experience the world's strongest rugby culture – Griffin still sees Play Rugby USA as a work in progress. His account of its growth, however, shows why he felt confident enough to export it.

"We started in 2005 but didn't start putting processes in place until 2006," he adds, "and we've gone from 10 schools then to 267 now.

A better world through rugby is our vision, and we always talk about 'rugby for good'. It's not just rugby. It's essentially using rugby to help kids improve wellness, to help them be successful, which starts in education, and then it's about empowering them to develop themselves and take charge of their own destiny. Rugby's good for that, not just when they're playing but in the classroom as well.

I think the values we seek to impart are inherent in the game – integrity, honesty and camaraderie.

'All those values are there'



Griffin's next words – expressed with his customary assurance – hint at the source of his enthusiasm for his sport.

"It's all taken for granted in the UK," he says, "it's handed to you on a plate to play rugby. All those values are there but you don't explicitly think about them. Over here, it's part of the brand of rugby, how it identifies itself and how it's different from other sports. I think it's about respect especially, and also solidarity."

Griffin – a super-fit 37-year-old who played US Super League rugby, at hooker for Old Blue, for 13 years – is British. After playing at Durham University and semi-professionally for Birmingham & Solihull, he moved to New York to work for Barclays and ended up qualifying to represent the USA. He won nine caps for the Eagles, including two appearances against England's second string; off the field he worked for two years as director of national high school and junior rugby for the American governing body. Alongside the USA Rugby chief executive, Nigel Melville – another Englishman – Griffin played a key role in introducing the game to ever greater numbers of American children.

Michael Lee/Play Rugby USA



"Rookie Rugby is about tag rugby for elementary and middle-school kids," Griffin says, of the American-branded form of the game he and Melville created. "We don't have many facilities so we have to play tag, but it does enable lots of girls to participate. More than 40% of our participants at Play Rugby USA are girls, and I would think the US has more girls playing rugby than most other nations."

Now working out of a buzzing Manhattan office – and employing 12 staff full-time and as many as 50 part-time – Griffin approaches his work with the sort of muscular missionary zeal that would have been familiar to the 19th-century proselytisers who first spread rugby around the globe. Though America had taken the unfortunate decision to leave the fold a hundred years before rugby appeared on the scene, it seem Griffin is on a one-man mission to bring it back:

When we started, there were no kids playing rugby in New York, none, and it was a perception people had that rugby was this crazy, dangerous game, something you heard about in college more on the social scale. So we almost had to brand it as an educational thing, which is what it has now become known as in New York. The challenges that come with that perception of rugby, you get around them with some people and others are just stubborn. But you know, it's a big country, so if I have a school saying no five times, I'll just go to five others who say yes and I'll have five teams playing rugby there.

Those challenges include the notion that rugby is simply crazy, "football without pads", but Griffin senses that outside factors – rugby's readmission to the Olympics in 2016; football's difficulties over head injuries increasing the appeal of a more safety conscious contact sport – are now conspiring to help him. While President Obama said he would not want a son of his to play football, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton (whose husband played rugby at Oxford) has endorsed Play Rugby USA. So, among other luminaries, has Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. As a bonus, the success of the project is starting to have an effect on the American senior game.

"We have a bunch of kids who have come through Play Rugby USA and gone into clubs and so on," Griffin says. "In high schools we play sevens and at under-13 and under-15 we play equal numbers – seven, 10, 12 – whatever they have available. That will become under-17s in a year or so and then maybe under-19s. We've then created an academy for the top 30 girls and the top 30 boys by invitation only, and they compete against high-school teams in summer sevens leagues.

"Beyond that, they can go to clubs, or of course they can go to college –

most of the kids want to play at college and we can and do help them with that. Most of our kids will play in college and then come back. Part of our programme is to encourage them to go to college and to continue playing."

And therein, so far as Griffin's hopes for R4UK are concerned, lies the rub. Griffin's British project – part of a hoped-for "global rugby collaborative" of developmental and educational organisations – launched in summer 2012 in Lambeth, not a London borough from which any British university, never mind a professional club or national team, would expect to draw too many players. R4UK aims to use rugby to give children from disadvantaged areas a lift in every part of their lives.

Griffin says: "We had 60 sessions in six schools in the 10 weeks up to Christmas. The after-school piece of the programme will be set up in February and it will expand in the summer term. It's about creating a model to look to replicate in other boroughs and other cities, pending the funding.

"That's the key. The ongoing, never-ending challenge for us as a charity is finding the funding."

As good causes go, Mark Griffin's is particularly worth supporting – on either side of the Atlantic.