On a week’s notice and on a cold-running November night no less, 80 men arrived at Pine Banks Park Field, home of Mystic River Rugby, to showcase their name and talent to the newest member of Major League Rugby, the New England Free Jacks. The ‘miniature’ combine talent search was no doubt a highly successful evening for the young organization. Appropriately pulling from players all across the region, it was a real coming together moment for the area and vindication for many the long rugby path they’ve found themselves on. It played out a bit like the Godfather’s meeting of the five families, featuring coaches lending a hand from nearly all the biggest clubs and colleges in the area.

“To be able to bring the rugby community together, the clubs, obviously with 80 players turning out, it’s really something we’ve struggled with in the Boston area for a while, is to get all the clubs to work together,” Free Jacks’ head coach Josh Smith, or Smitty as he’s known by those closest, had to say. “This opportunity with the Free Jacks has really galvanized everybody.”

That’s one of the largest assets the Free Jacks will have. Their local talent pool is far from relegated to a dearth of clubs in the vicinity. They’ll have the New England region as a whole to facilitate into the appropriate talent pipeline a budding professional side will require. And if the first showing of how that will all work out is any indication, things are looking quite up.

“I think it’s pretty telling of New England that you know a week’s notice between players, and staff, refs, admin, there’s a 100 people here running around on a school/work night, it’s 40 degrees, it’s fantastic, it’s great,” said Free Jacks’ CEO Alex Magleby of the night. “And there’s certainly some diamonds in the rough, and there’s a lot of players that I think given the right opportunity and the right environment to become really handy rugby players.”

“You know it was a good session, I thought our managers actually did an unbelievable job getting this thing sorted and off the ground with 80 plus players,” Smith added. “The talent pool is pretty solid… We’ll probably add upwards of five guys as immediate as tomorrow, and there’s quite a bit of young talent that we’ll be looking at down the road. It was a good first step down the pathways, 80 guys on a Monday night. Yeah, pretty happy with it.”

“It’s a lot of good boys who came out. Everybody was bringing it, brought their shoulders. It was a good level of intensity,” AIC alumni standout Christian Adams, who played in the team’s first exhibition game in Canada, said of Monday. “The talent was good, everybody can work on their skills a little bit, but overall I think the talent was good.”

“It was really good for the [Boston Irish] Wolfhounds and good for Boston rugby. It’s great to see a lot of the younger players coming up through the ranks,” Wolfhounds’ captain Paul Taylor noted of the chance to be out there.

And even though this team only has so many roster spots to hand out, that doesn’t mean efforts Monday were for naught. There will be expanding opportunities down the road as the team looks to develop a close-knit relationship with the local clubs and player base to ensure a wave of MLR-ready players is constantly in the wings.

“There will also be players that are kind of put on a pathway. They might not be able to help us in 2019, but they might be someone we’re looking at in 2020, 2021, and eventually leading into us using like a U-23 development type side,” Smitty added. “So the blueprint really for theses combines will be player identification and then putting these guys into the right spot to continue to develop so that down the road we’re getting them at the right level.”

With a major series against the Irish provincial development sides in the Spring, the Free Jacks hope to largely have the basis of their roster figured out by February 2019. Things will certainly still shift from there as that’ll be 11 months out from the anticipated entrance into MLR season three. “It’s gonna be pretty fluid, right now our main focus is the New England area, who do we have here,” said Smith. “We ideally have this thing sorted out by February so that we can prep for the Irish.” And of that, Smith noted the importance of matches like them. “It attracts players, the opportunity to play one of those sides is unreal, and now we’re playing all four… It legitimizes our [exhibition] season as well.”

But maintaining that local connection to players, as MLR advertises, is vitally important to the growth of the game in the region itself.

“From the Boston perspective, it means everything to us [developing a local pipeline of talent], we want a good local base, we want the community in Boston to be part of this, and that’s really how it’s going to sell,” Smith opined. “If there’s local players involved, people will come out.”

As noted in a post-session debrief by none other than the CEO, Magleby mentioned that this organization isn’t quite a professional one, yet. Borrowing many staff members previously working gigs at the clubs, he noted that not just as an on-field product but as an organization as a whole this outfit will improve with time and effort. And from even just a moment on the field, watching the New England rugby body moving in unison, it’s at least certainly clear that the team has a great man at the helm, somebody who has seen the game from the collegiate to international level. As said in the fantastic movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.”

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