This. To be fair though there are some states in the US that have the populations of medium sized countries which could allow RL to develop along the lines of what’s being proposed in California and Texas.
Florida, Illinois, New York and Ohio etc to name just a few. Maybe concentrate on building an inter-state rivalry between the various cities and towns in that state instead of dreaming about some miracle US/North American professional competition that’s never going to happen unless some billionaire with a TV deal magic’s up out of nowhere.
The chances of this magic billionaire appearing is far more likely if there are more competitions like your California or Texas across the US, or maybe each of these regional competitions will one day turn into additional Conferences that feed into a National competition.
Anyway, whilst either of the above won't be happening anytime soon, I do hope that we see more of a regionalised / localised approach start to happen more across the US. For me, and I will admit that I'm following from afar, it has felt like Rugby League in the US has been too focused on just on the USARL (and previously AMNRL) Premiership.
By this I mean, any new teams or areas have been purely focused on trying to join that competition and nothing is done to help build the foundations below it, which has, in my opinion, stagnated the spreading of the code .
Even with both the Texas and California competitions, there are some rather ambitious plans, LA to SF for example is almost 6 hours driving, and whilst flights are cheap, they add up very quickly once you have 20-odd people flying regularly and are a lot to ask from amateur players for anymore than one offs, and even if you can get a few groups to commit to that, it then sets a high barrier for any new groups or teams to join (the same issue the East Coast competition has).
I hope for California, part of its mid-term plans to grow are to more break into sub-conferences, centred around SF and LA, versus everyone trying to play each other. From SF, the likes of Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento are all big cities which are within 2 hours of each other, whilst LA to San Diego is the same.
A setup like that would make it far easier for new clubs to pop up and to join or to start to build out reserve grade or age group teams below the top tier.
