Youth rugby organization is slowly spreading the sport ahead of a pro team's arrival next year.

ATLANTA — Atlanta is a soccer town – from the Atlanta United flags hanging in front of homes to the packed stands at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the sport’s success story in this city has been incredible.

But could it also be a rugby town?

If it can, the first signs of rugby taking hold in Atlanta can be seen on an old baseball field in Castleberry Hill.

There, every Thursday at The Villages of Castleberry Hill apartment complex, a couple dozen kids file onto the overgrown baseball field at the John Hope Community Center and play a sport most hadn’t even heard of until it was introduced as an option.

“They’ve taken to it, I mean they ask, if it’s a Thursday, they are like – ‘Yeah we doing rugby today? We doing rugby?’ And I have to tell them, ‘Yes we’re doing rugby today,’” said William Oliver, the executive director of STEAMsport, a nonprofit after-school youth program for underserved Atlanta communities.

Oliver’s after-school program is partnered with Atlanta Youth Rugby, an organization that aims to build the sport in the metro.

Atlanta Youth Rugby, in turn, is partnered with Rugby ATL, the professional Major League Rugby team set to play its first season next year.

Anton Forbes-Roberts, the CEO and founder of Atlanta Youth Rugby, said rugby is starting to see the same momentum sprouting in Atlanta that soccer experienced.

“This is really an inflection point for the city,” he said. “It’s interesting when you look at like a heat map of youth rugby in America – there’s this big hole in the Southeast, and yet we have a population of six million in this metro, so all the ingredients are now coming together.”

Forbes-Roberts said the pro team has studied the market and identified as many as a million sports fans who could be converted into core rugby supporters. Atlanta Youth Rugby has competitive development programs and clubs in place in Inman Park, which was the first, Buckhead, West Cobb, Tri-Cities and now Castleberry, the most recent.

“So I think there’s an opportunity to do something, maybe not with the same velocity, but the same trajectory as soccer has done,” he said. “Our approach has never been to say, ‘This is the greatest thing in the world you should do this,’ it’s, ‘Hey here’s this thing you can try and you see if you like it.’”

“And it’s very sticky,” Forbes-Roberts added.

That stickiness is perhaps best on display in Castleberry Hill, where kids happily offer up how much they love rugby.

“Rugby is the bestest thing ever," one young player, Darius, said.

“I know at first some of them are like, ‘football, football!’ and we’re like, ‘it’s rugby,’” said Gracie Martinez, an Atlanta Youth Rugby coach and herself a high-level rugby player. "It’s not like they don’t wanna play it, they just - all they know is football. But once they start learning to how to actually pass the ball and then they start kicking and all these different skills, they just start falling in love with it and it’s pretty cool to see.”

The kids play a number of little games that build rugby skills, like a freeze-tag style game that emphasizes passing, an essential component of the teamwork-heavy sport.

Beneath the flurry of running around and shrieks of delight that come with simply playing around, Martinez said the sport is also really taking hold among these kids.

“It’s really gratifying seeing them actually retain information instead of running blindly with the ball,” she said. “They’re actually looking for space and putting up hands when they want the ball, it’s pretty cool to see that the information is sinking in.”

“If anything we always tell them, ‘Well, you play football, this could teach you really cool skills for football,’ and then most of them just keep playing, and they’re like, ‘Yeah we don’t wanna play football we wanna keep playing rugby,” Martinez added. “That’s great for me to hear, for kids in this generation rugby’s not that big but it’s growing. To see kids actually know what rugby is and be excited to play it, that’s like a dream come true.”

Forbes-Roberts said the effort to develop talent in Atlanta is already paying off, with three young players making their way up the national youth ranks.

“The model is working, the idea is to introduce the fun sport and then create leadership in each of the communities, augment it with professional coaches and a pipeline for the kids who really take to it to go all the way to scholarship university,” Forbes-Roberts said. “It’s important to note that here in Atlanta we’re replicating from an age standpoint what New Zealand does, what England does. We’re starting kids at age 6, so the potential is always long-term, and that’s the vision that you have to have to make anything successful, but that’s the approach we’re taking.”

“And this is Atlanta, it has to reflect our community. It can’t be our idea, or my idea of rugby,” Forbes-Roberts added. “It has to be what works for Atlanta.”

If it works for Atlanta, as we’ve already seen it work with soccer, rugby could reshape the sports landscape in the city.

Atlanta Youth Rugby will be holding a series of parent social open houses in neighborhoods throughout October, check out their calendar if you’re interested in getting involved.