America’s pro rugby union league ends its season on Sunday. For one of the men who made it happen it is time for reflection, rest … and getting ready to go again

On Sunday afternoon in Obetz, just outside Columbus, the Ohio Aviators will play the Denver Stampede. The winners – with a bonus point, in Ohio’s case – will be the first PRO Rugby champions.

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The five-team league has no championship game. Best over 12 rounds wins. It just happens that come the final weekend of the league’s first season, these two teams have not sorted out who that is.

“Couldn’t have planned it any better,” said Steve Lewis, the fledgling organisation’s director of rugby, over breakfast on the Upper West Side. “Were it plannable, of course. It’s an interesting symmetry: our first game was Ohio at Denver [in the snow in April] and that was a tight finish, the only game we’ve had that went into extra time, which was one of our innovations. So this is ideal: final game of the year, all the marbles. It sets it up nicely.”

Lewis is an ebullient Scot whose ebullience has not been entirely rubbed off by nine months jetting to and fro in sole service of America’s first pro league. Like league owner Doug Schoninger, he works out of New York City. The five teams are in the middle and west – Ohio, Denver, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco.

Lewis has reason to smile, warily as much as wearily. Crowds have been satisfactory if small; press coverage positive if slightly bemused; politics, in a rugby landscape that manages to be scattered and congested at once, manageable if predictably intense. Denver, for example, moved home mid-season, from the Glendale Raptors’ rugby-built Infinity Park to Ciber Field, a college soccer stadium. Words were exchanged. The franchise survived and so did the league.

Season one of Schoninger’s epic, then, is almost in the can. A review will follow in September, followed by planning for season two. Expansion is on the cards: Canada, maybe. The east coast, possibly.

“You want to pair people up from a rivalry perspective and a travel perspective,” Lewis said. “So Chicago for Columbus, Boston for New York. That in my opinion would be ideal, but we may not find the venues.”

Much of Lewis’s work has been visible at the existing venues, on their newly marked-out turf. Much has gone to plan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jamie Mackintosh takes on the San Diego defence. Photograph: Joseph K Ghammashi/PRO Rugby

Two of the league’s marquee talents – internationals employed to be “good citizens as well as good players” – will meet in the decider: the South Africa back row Pedrie Wannenburg for Denver, the New Zealand prop Jamie Mackintosh for Ohio. Over scrambled eggs and strong coffee, Lewis described how Mackintosh, from Dunedin, a hotbed of All Black rugby, came to live and play in Obetz, a village outside Columbus most famous for its Zucchinifest which has nonetheless embraced rugby, building a small stadium from scratch.

“Everyone wanted to go to San Francisco and San Diego,” he said. “So how do I get anyone to go to Obetz and Sacramento and Denver? [Italy back] Mirco Bergamasco wanted to go to Sacramento, because his wife had lived there before. [Australia rugby league great] Timana Tahu had family connections in Denver, so that was OK. But how do I get anyone to go to Columbus?

“[Ex-Zebre flanker] Filippo Ferrarini was the first one. I thought: ‘You’re Italian, Columbus, off you go.’ He didn’t get it, so I had to explain it to him afterwards. And then Mackintosh came on track and he was really easy.”

The New Zealander is a one-cap All Black loosehead, a big man known to home fans as “Whopper”. He approached rugby’s American frontier with typically Kiwi affability.

“He said, “I don’t mind, Steve, I’m really easy, wherever you want to put me.’

“I said, ‘What kind of place do you like?’

“He said, ‘I’m a country boy, I’d rather be somewhere with a bit of hunting, a bit of fishing.’

“So I had to call up Paul Holmes at [Ohio-based US national development academy] Tiger Rugby and say, ‘Is there any hunting and fishing near Obetz?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, loads.’ So I told Mackintosh I thought Ohio might be the right fit for him and he went there, embraced it and went well.”

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Lewis speaks to Matt McCarthy of rugbywrapup.com in March.

San Francisco’s star man, Mils Muliaina, has 99 more All Black caps than Mackintosh. Unfortunately, the great full-back arrived late and has not featured much for a team which limped to 3-8 ahead of its final meeting with Sacramento (also 3-8, making Saturday’s game a playoff to avoid last place). But on the whole the experiment has worked. The big names have visas and may be back for more.

Discussing recruitment for 2017, Lewis said: “I don’t think we need the marquee players as much anymore, though. If we’re expanding my biggest concern is structural constraint, ie: are there enough good players to staff those expansion teams? Clearly if we do [expand] then the number of foreign players on each team will need to go up, likely to five to seven, and I think that we’ll skew younger.”

Asked where such foreign players might come from, he said: “Everyone’s sniffing around, but my next happy hunting ground will be South Africa. Biggest talent pool, bottleneck of talent, exacerbated by the falling rand and the coaching system. There’s going to be lots of good young South African players, shall we say ‘competitively priced’. So that would be a sweet spot, I think. [New Zealand] Mitre 10 Cup guys, the calendar works, Japan the calendar works.”

At home, the calendar still needs to work for everyone. PRO Rugby ran from mid-April to the end of July. One top club competition, the east-coast American Rugby Premiership, is set to move to September-November. The west-coast Pacific Rugby Premiership, home to Glendale and other powerful clubs, may or may not follow. Politics.

PRO Rugby will continue to grapple with whether to play in the June Test window. This year, while the Eagles lost to Italy and beat Russia, it did. Politics-plus.



Nor, Lewis said, does the PRO Rugby calendar work with the European season. But, thought-provokingly in an age of Premiership games in New Jersey and Pro12 thoughts of a team on the US east coast, he added: “You do have academy players there who have bugger all to do between January and May. I think that’s an option and we’ve had those conversations with Quins, London Irish. So I think the league will probably skew younger.”

The young league, Lewis said, shows encouraging signs of growth. Teams have improved in fitness and skill; tries have been scored at a standard of play “slightly below Currie Cup, slightly below Mitre 10 Cup, a reasonable level to have aimed at, a reasonable level to have got to”.

Also, along with red “safe tackle lines” on shirts and no draws, PRO Rugby empowered referees to avoid too many scrum re-sets by awarding free-kicks. According to fascinating analysis of the league’s stats by Jake Frechette for Rugby Today, the policy seems to be working.

“In the 2015 Six Nations,” Frechette writes, “51% of scrums were completed successfully. At the World Cup, 68% [of scrums] were completed successfully. For PRO, [where average number of scrums per game is high at nearly 20] the rate so far is 77%. That’s good news for everyone who wants to see the ball played from a scrum instead of hearing a referee’s whistle. That’s all of us, right?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pedrie Wannenberg in action for Denver, against San Diego. Photograph: Connie Hatfield

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Players have shone. Dom Waldouck, once a centre for Wasps, Northampton, London Irish and England Saxons, did well at Ohio and has earned a trial at Newcastle. Langilangi Haupeakui, a hard-hitting Sacramento No8, came to the league from a tough upbringing and division two rugby with the East Palo Alto Razorbacks. Five months later, Lewis said, he “got fit, finally ate well and all of a sudden, boom, launched into the Eagles, got a cap and is going for a trial with Harlequins next week when they come over”.

Other successes include Spike Davis, a defensive tackle who attended camp with the Washington Redskins and Green Bay Packers before pitching up in Ohio as a 6ft 4in, 250lbs wing. There is also Hanco Germishuys, a US junior flanker “no longer a man among boys or a boy among men” after a season with Denver, and the San Diego openside Cecil Garber, a find from the Seattle Saracens with a tackle count off the charts.

“We’ve fulfilled that part of the mission,” Lewis said. “Three, four, five players are now on [USA coach] John Mitchell’s radar who maybe wouldn’t have been otherwise.”

Thanks to Lewis and Schoninger, a pro competition that would not otherwise have been on world rugby’s radar is now there. A blip, maybe, but growing brighter. After Sunday’s finale, there will be a breather for all concerned. Then the hard work begins again.