‘Could take off pretty quickly’: The plan to grow rugby league in the USA
With the NRL back in Vegas for its season opener, the first Australian to coach in the USARL has outlined his thoughts on how to grow rugby league in America.
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Greater promotion of the domestic game, a focus on grassroots development and catching the eye of the right type of businesspeople could lead to an ‘explosion’ of rugby league in the USA, according to the first Australian to coach in America’s top-tier national competition.
As the NRL prepares for the second instalment of its Las Vegas season opener, Wayne Forbes, who became the first Australian to take charge of a team in the USARL, believes that the initiative certainly has the potential to give rugby league a huge boost in the US.
“With this Vegas stuff, with all the attention and exposure, it only needs the right group of Americans or the right organisations with a bit of coin behind them to say, ‘Wow, this is the greatest game of all,’ because Americans are sports crazy,” he said.
“So if people put some money behind it and it was managed the right way then it could take off pretty quickly.”
And while the bright lights and stardust of the Vegas extravaganza are important in lifting the profile of rugby league on foreign shores, Forbes said that ultimately some less glamorous work would be key in ensuring the growth of the game in America.
“Vegas is the sugar hit and the hype and it’s amazing and I wish I was there, but make sure you bring the domestic comp along for the ride,” he said.
“I think if there’s more attention given to their domestic comp and their wants and needs then it could really grow because Vegas is there and gone. What keeps the attention on the game over there?”
ASTROTURF AND GRIDIRON POSTS
Gold Coast-based Forbes, who currently coaches the Cudgen Hornets in the Northern Rivers Regional Rugby League competition and the Northern Rivers Titans representative team, had his first experience with US domestic league in 2015 when he joined the Jacksonville Axemen as coach.
And while the likes of current USA national team coach Sean Rutgerson and Matt Keeley were Aussies who had previously been player-coaches in the USARL before him, Forbes was the first dedicated non-playing Australian coach in the competition.
“I just wanted to do something different. I was coaching with the Titans under-18s in the Mal Meninga Cup and coaching A-grade at Burleigh, which were really great positions to have, but I just felt like there was some other way to contribute to rugby league and after a bit of research I knew there were developing countries out there,” he said.
“When I looking around I saw America, and who doesn’t want to go to America?”
Describing the playing standard back then as “roughly equivalent to a good Australian community reserve-grade competition”, Forbes got an insight into some of the challenges associated with being a tiny minority sport in the country.
“There were different clubs with different setups. Some had a bit of money, some had none. We trained out the back of the University of North Florida on a soccer field, which is all good and well because some clubs had to train on gridiron ovals with the astroturf.
“As soon as I saw one of those, I thought ‘Oh my god, what about the skin off the knees and elbows!’ You’d send a tough Australian squad over there though and they’d be a bit hesitant because they’re not used to it but the boys over there didn’t question it,” he said.
“Everything was still developing with the facilities. You still didn’t have rugby league posts, you had gridiron posts.”
And while Forbes only coached for one season with the Axemen, he has kept a keen eye on the progress of the USARL and has remained in contact with key American rugby league officials over the past decade.
“More teams have been added, there are more locations, more variety. Even just from watching a couple of games you can see that the refereeing has improved a lot,” he said.
“Everything is starting to evolve and go the right way and there were certainly some good players over there. It would be an aim of the USARL to become professional over the next few years and when that happens it could explode.”
CREATING AMERICAN NRL STARS
While much of the focus in Australia about the NRL’s Las Vegas venture has been on the potential financial gains from US betting markets, there has also been talk about how it could also create an extra pipeline of players, primarily made up of college football athletes who don’t crack the NFL.
According to Forbes, the theory of targeting those who play other football codes makes sense.
“Some universities have a funded union program where league isn’t. And with the Jacksonville Axemen, a lot of the league players came from their union team,” he said.
“There were a lot of athletes who weren’t making it in their chosen fields but still had that belief of ‘making it’ in some sort of sport, so for some that was a fall back option. I remember going out for dinner with one player because he wanted to talk about how he could become an NRL player.”
The more optimistic proponents of this line of thought can also point to the amazing story of Joe Eichner, a former Jacksonville Axeman player who moved to Australia to play for the Junee Diesels and Mackay Brothers in local A-grade competitions, before becoming the first American to play in the Queensland Cup when he lined up for the Northern Pride in 2019 and 2020.
However Forbes warns that Eichner was an exception and not the rule when it came to American rugby league players.
“He was the only one over there that I was aware of,” he said.
“There were some good athletes over there and a lot of them could do basic catch-and-pass drills well, but the understanding of the structures and process behind the game of rugby league wasn’t there,” said Forbes. “It was just ‘Give me the ball and run hard.’”
He added: “Some were probably a bit oblivious as to the level of skill and physical ability that they needed to actually play at an NRL level. Some thought, ‘We’re going really well at the Jacksonville Axemen, we’re beating everybody, the next step then is NRL,’” he added.
“A lot of it was more the standard American attitude of, ‘I’m American, I’m a good athlete, why can’t I make it?’”
GRASSROOTS REMAINS THE KEY
If the NRL is serious about developing the game in the US and tapping into another market of players, Forbes said officials need to put in the hard yards and start at the bottom.
“They’ve got to be exposed to football at our level younger and for longer. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to travel overseas to do that, they just need to have the foundations in America to build that,” he said.
“It’s not dissimilar to how the NRL are doing it in Australia: it’s all about the grassroots, simple as that. It’s about investing the time, the effort and money into grassroots development. And that’s through programs, through visiting schools and universities and of course having the right people deliver those programs.”
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