Next month sees the Penn Mutual Collegiate Rugby Championship hit Philadelphia from May 30-31, as the sport continues to find footholds stateside. United World Sports, which oversees the event as well as the growing
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Jonathan First, President of United World Sports, about the growth of the sport and what lays ahead.
First on connecting rugby with fans: The approach to rugby that we’ve taken here is that it is a blank slate, there is no baggage or negativity. The way that we’ve approached this sport in general is that we have to promote it to a large scale, which is why television was critical to our success. So the NBC partnership that we’ve developed catapulted what rugby in this country has become because it was suddenly available to 130 million households. Our average broadcast, between all the channels we are on, is close to six million a broadcast. That really broke rugby here. Before that, events were not really generating any significant traction.
On next steps: We’ve got to keep moving forward. We are developing new events on both a worldwide and a domestic basis. We’ve focused a tremendous amount of activity into colleges including two events, the Collegiate Rugby Championship and also the Varsity Cup as well as two more that we are probably going to come out with in 2016. We’ve also invested heavily in Rhino, which is our 365-day a year business with equipment, balls as well as apparel and we are placing a tremendous amount of money in that.
On the USA Sevens event in Las Vegas: The city has been a game-changer for this event because it is a destination and an attraction in of itself. It has allowed this event to grow at a tremendous pace. When the event was in San Diego, and before that Los Angeles, the attraction value was much less. As Vegas delivers so much more entertainment value for the fan. Lessons learned: when you have a sport like rugby, you need to surround it with as many attraction values as you can to help get the fan to buy the ticket. That event really became an event in a major way because of the move. We have a lot more to do and now we have to focus on the corporate side of it and get major corporations in to participate as well.
On fans: Rugby fans are loyal and smart. They will absolutely spend money to see the sport and to play the sport if the right events are built for them. Our Facebook following keep increasing and our database is now up to 160,000 and that keeps increasing. What we found with the actual rugby fan is that they are very engaged, and whatever we promote, whether it is a sponsor or an event, they listen.
