The five teams which will contest the first professional US rugby union competition, PRO Rugby, convene on Monday for their first full days of training.

According to organisers, the competition that kicks off on 17 April will feature innovations such as limited scrum resets and, because no American loves a tie, sudden-death overtime. There will also be one frontline female referee, the experienced Leah Berard.

On the first game day, San Francisco will travel to Sacramento and Ohio will play at Denver. San Diego will enter in round two.

The season will run into July, each team playing 12 games with no championship play-off. Most games will be on Sundays to allow for local club play on Saturdays, though in June, in an unavoidable glitch familiar to European rugby, two game weekends will clash with international fixtures.

Each team will be identified only by the name of its city or state and an apportioned color scheme. PRO Rugby hopes supporters will help decide team names later on.

Salaries for homegrown players are not high by world standards, although by US standards they are, for the first time, salaries of any kind at all.

The home jerseys of the five PRO Rugby teams. Photograph: Screengrab/PRO Rugby

Some foreign signings have been announced: all are highly experienced. The Italy wing Mirco Bergamasco will bring his 89 caps and 256 Test points to Sacramento; South Africa flanker Pedrie Wannenburg has 20 caps and is bound for Denver. The threequarter Phil Mackenzie has 32 caps for Canada and is now with San Diego; New Zealand sevens back Orene Ai’i has joined up with San Francisco. Others remain subject to negotiations.



Head and assistant coaches have been named too. One of the head coaches, San Francisco’s Paul Keeler, spent Sunday preparing his players, his facilities and even his kit.

“We’re pioneers,” he said, on a call from the Bay Area to New York, with a laugh. “We’re pioneering here. I guess we have to hope we don’t lose our way or our stores.”

Lest that conjure up a picture of Keeler as some sort of rugby Revenant, he has a perfectly healthy pedigree. Coming to PRO Rugby from the college game, he played for and then coached New York Old Blue before coaching another club power, San Francisco Golden Gate.

Other than Ai’i and potentially other internationals, his new squad draws on capped US Eagles and club players picked by way of training combines. Final rosters are due to be announced soon.



“It’s 100% a new thing,” Keeler said, of a squad largely drawn from the thriving Bay Area rugby scene and thus including “a couple of players from Golden Gate, some from Olympic Club and Life West … two cousins, some brothers, a large Polynesian group.”

San Francisco, remember, produced Samu Manoa, once of Northampton, now of Toulon.

It is an arrangement which to some degree reflects PRO Rugby chief executive Doug Schoninger’s desire to first knit his new competition into the grassroots of American rugby. Promotion has been relatively low-key, aimed at reaching rugby players and watchers via social media. Broadcast, it is planned, will proceed in similar fashion.

Though Keeler hailed the “blue collar” feel of his San Francisco set-up and said “every day is busy”, his and others’ jobs will not become easier any time soon. Golden Gate, for example, might have supplied more players, had they not had the Pacific Rugby Premiership to concern themselves with.

Doug Schoninger – the PRO Rugby chief executive who is ‘like Sasquatch’ to some American rugby fans – talks to Matt McCarthy of Rugby Wrap Up

On the other side of the continent the lack of an east coast team – in part due to a lack of suitable playing surfaces and venues – has disappointed the kinds of rugby lovers who turned out in reasonable numbers to see London Irish and Saracens play in New Jersey on Saturday. Had there been one, the likes of Old Blue, New York Athletic Club and Atlanta’s Life Running Eagles might have lost more players too.

Keeler and his fellow coaches face something of an obstacle course. In San Francisco, work to give the players a “base platform” of professional fitness has begun at various venues: at Life West RFC in the city of Hayward, in Santa Clara and hopefully at the Googleplex in Mountain View. The tech giant has a rugby team. True story.

The match venues for PRO Rugby tell a story of their own. San Francisco will open at Sacramento’s Bonney Field, a soccer venue that with a capacity of 11,442 is comfortably the largest stadium in play. San Diego will cohabit with the University of San Diego at Torero Stadium, which holds 6,000 fans. Denver will use Infinity Park in Glendale, purpose-built for rugby but holding just 4,000.

Keeler’s team will use Boxer Stadium, “an old gem of the San Francisco Bay Area”, its bleachers nestled in Balboa Park. It holds 3,500. Smallest of all, the Ohio team will begin life in Memorial Park in Obetz, a village just south of Columbus.