It’s an excellent piece on a coach’s efforts to start and maintain a rugby team at an all African-American charter high school in Washington D.C.

I am always in favor of getting rugby out to the grass roots in the United States. I am even more in favor of getting it out to kids who may have never heard of the sport, let alone trying to play it. Among African-American youth, Basketball and American Football are by far and away the two most popular sports-all one has to do is watch an NBA or NFL game to see that. Among Hispanic kids, soccer, baseball and basketball are the most popular sports. The only ethnic group that has strong rugby ties are the Pacific Islanders who settle in the West Coast.

In the U.S, most players don’t discover the sport until they are in college.  If the USA is going to move beyond minnow status in rugby-The Eagles just lost to Japan this past weekend-we have got to get more school kids involved in the sport at the grass roots level. Such a movement has got to include ALL American kids, including African American and Hispanic kids.  If you look at an American football player like a Ray Lewis-who is a great all around athlete (State Championship wrestler in high school) or a Donovan McNabb, and then try to imagine them wearing rugby shorts and a jersey, you cannot help but to wonder what they could do with the oval ball. (Ray Lewis would have been a BEAST as an 8 man)

Let’s face it, USA rugby has not been the only rugby union that was more lily- white than the National Hockey League for a long time. When I first watched rugby on TV back in the 80’s, I did not see a single player of color from France (That would change in the 90’s with Benazzi and N’Tamack), the Home Nations, Australia,  and South Africa (which was still in the Apartheid era and boycotted internationally) The All Blacks had some Maori players, and that was as much color as one saw back then. England and South Africa have been making strides getting more players of color in their starting XV.

Here in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis South High Rugby club has been very successful getting more African American players involved in the game, same at Hopkins-both clubs coached by Old Boys from my Metropolis Rugby Club.

My hope for my Grandson Duncan and all kids is that we will reach a point where a sport is just that, a sport-and not a sport just for black kids(Soccer in Africa or basketball in the US), or white kids (ice hockey in my part of the US, or rugby)

As more players of color get involved in rugby, it won’t just tear down the sporting stereotypes that we carry, but it will tear down social barriers as well. In the end, we all win.