"If enough US universities take up rugby and hire coaches like Jones, the US will start to become a stronger rugby nation. They have plenty of athletes to choose from even after the best ones take a football, baseball or basketball scholarship" -CanadianSteve
CanadianSteve, at the moment men's college rugby does not receive any money from the NCAA - this is because its doesn't have 'varsity' status. Without varsity status college rugby will not have the neccessary funds to develop strong rugby programs that are needed in order to attract the best HS athletes that miss out on sports scholarships. Rugby is a strong club game among colleges but what it really needs is to be put on the 'emerging sports' list by the NCAA. Just recently women's college rugby was awarded varsity status and put on the 'emerging sports' list by the NCAA. This move by the NCAA to grant women's rugby varsity status has helped the chances of men's college rugby to be granted varsity status in the near future. When this happens American rugby will noticably improve.
CanadianSteve, here are a couple of articles about Dan Lyle (Bath-Captain). These are a few yrs old.
Huge Splash Across the Pond <h3>Would-be NFL tight end Dan Lyle has taken up a new game -- and reinvented it</h3> <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 align=right bgcolor=#cccc99> <tbody> <tr> <td nowrap>
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Posted: Tuesday September 28, 1999 08:58 AM <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 align=right> <tbody> <tr valign=top> <td width=10></td> <td width=250>
Lyle found the perfect outlet for his athletic skills. <NOBR>Jamie McDonald/Allsport</NOBR></td></tr></tbody></table>
By Grant Wahl
The son of a two-star Army general, Dan Lyle wants it known that he loves his country, he really does. It's just that, by choosing obscurity in England over glitz in the States -- the Bath Rugby Club over the Minnesota Vikings -- Lyle surely violated some law dating back to the Revolutionary War. "All my friends were saying, Go to Minnesota, you idiot!" says Lyle, who weighed simultaneous offers from the two teams in 1996. "But some of the best experiences of my life had been in rugby, and one reason I left football in the first place was that the turnover is so high and the guarantees are so low. I finally decided if you enjoy what you're doing, why spoil a good thing?" Lyle told the NFL to take a hike, and three years later, on the eve of next month's Rugby World Cup, he's the first American to be considered among the best players on the planet. So smitten with him is the London
Sunday Times that last year it named Lyle, 28, to its World 15 international all-star team. "For a big guy he has absolutely staggering athleticism, and his dexterity with the ball is amazing," says Stephen Jones, the
Times's rugby correspondent since 1983. "He's probably one of the most extraordinary players I've ever seen." How could this happen? How in just five years could a part-time Bennigan's waiter and aspiring NFL tight end take up rugby, sign with the world's most storied club and redefine the number 8 flanker position? What's more, if Lyle could do it, how good would the U.S. be if other talented football players -- Barry Sanders, we know you're listening -- followed Lyle to the field where sissydom is defined by helmets and pads? In England, where the 6'4", 245-pound Lyle is both a marvel and a Marvel Comics character (CAPTAIN AMERICA! screamed one tabloid), his secret is simple. He combines the skills developed in common American sports -- football, basketball and soccer -- with a blessed disregard for English stuffiness. Take kickoffs. While most rugby teams allow their opponents to catch kickoffs, Lyle barrels downfield and leaps for his own team's hanging boot as though he were Jerry Rice. "Dan is universally regarded as the greatest regatherer of kicks in the U.K.," says Jones. Take pitches. Three or four times a match he will toss a behind-the-back or over-the-head pass à la Larry Bird, astounding the Brits. "To me it's a natural thing, but they're so traditional," Lyle says. "They had never really been exposed to Americans playing their sport, and they didn't know how to react." Add to that flair a soccer sweeper's defensive vision, a running back's ability to break tackles and a basketball forward's 36 1/2-inch vertical leap (the better to catch line-outs, rugby's inbounds play), and it's easy to understand why U.S. coach and general manager Jack Clark says, "Athletically, Dan is a bit of a freak."
Freakish is probably the best way to describe Lyle's rise through the rugby ranks. It began in spring 1993, when he was living outside Washington, working as a waiter and hoping for a call from an NFL team. Lyle had gone undrafted despite his success at Virginia Military Institute, where he was the third-leading receiver in school history. On a lark one weekend his cousin Mark Casey invited Lyle to play a match with the Washington Rugby Club in Kenilworth Park. "It was the greatest thrill of my life," Lyle says. "Here was a combination of every sport I'd ever played, a sport that was all about attacking. In college I had been a receiver on a wishbone offense, so I caught only 30 balls a year. Now I could
go get the ball." It wasn't long before Clark, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., heard the buzz about the football player who was terrorizing the D.C. rugby scene on weekends. At a club tournament in Hartford that summer, Clark met Lyle for the first time. "Word had gotten out that I was looking for athletes who didn't necessarily have much rugby experience," Clark says. "Dan looked very much the business. His hands were twice the size of a normal man's, and his body was clearly NFL material." Without even seeing Lyle play, Clark invited him to the next U.S. training camp in Riverside, Calif., where Lyle's first attempt at catching a kickoff made his coach's jaw drop, cartoonlike, to the turf. "On kickoffs you need to have great timing, sprinter's speed and flypaper hands," says Clark. "Well, the first time Dan ran down a kickoff he was better at it than anyone else in the world. He didn't know anything else about what to do out there, but it didn't matter. We could teach him all that." After a couple of failed tryouts with the Washington Redskins, Lyle began traveling with the national team, moved to Aspen, Colo. (rugby's summer hotbed), and in October 1994 -- just 14 months after taking up the sport -- earned man-of-the-match honors in his first game for the U.S., against Ireland. He won them again in his second appearance as the Americans beat Canada on the road for the first time, 15-14. In May 1996, he approached a scout from Bath who had come to look at one of his U.S. teammates. "I went up to him and said, 'I'll be the biggest, strongest, fastest flanker you've ever had,'" Lyle says. "You know, the whole Jack Nicholson thing.
You want me on that wall. You need
me on that wall." Rugby had just gone professional in England, and Bath, the six-time national champion, took a look at the cocky American and made him an offer: one year, $52,000, no guarantees. At the same time the Vikings had another deal on the table: one year, $116,000 base, no guarantees. As Lyle pondered his decision for a month, Minnesota grew impatient. He had to choose, and he picked Bath. At Bath, Lyle's learning curve was "exponential, almost inverted," he says. He was man of the match in his first-team debut, a nationally televised showdown against rival Harlequins, and soon took over as the starting number 8, a position right behind the scrum that demands the skills of both a fullback and a middle linebacker. At the end of the 1996-97 season he was named the English Premiership's newcomer of the year and one of five finalists for
player of the year. That was nothing, though, compared with the following season, when Lyle led Bath to a 19-18 victory over the French club Brive in the European championship before 50,000 fans in Bordeaux, France. Lyle's astonishing rugby feats have spawned wild-eyed conjecture among the sport's American fans: What if more football players took up rugby? "They all say overseas that whenever we take this game seriously, we'll beat everyone, and it's true," says Lyle. "If I could get some All-Pros and train them in rugby, we'd go out and kick ass. Hell, I'll take all those guys who were second-team All-SEC but didn't make the NFL, guys who don't want to work for $25,000 a year at Kmart when they could be full-time athletes making $100,000, playing a sport that's pretty damn fun." That said, he won't have them for the five-week-long Rugby World Cup, the world's third-most-watched sporting event (behind soccer's World Cup and the Olympics). Besides Lyle, the only U.S. player who was a football standout is French-born flanker Richard Tardits, who became the alltime sack leader at Georgia and had a four-year NFL career with the Arizona Cardinals and the New England Patriots. Despite a recent 106-8 loss to England, the Americans are optimistic. Ranked 17th in the world, they have upset Canada, Fiji and Tonga this year, a remarkable feat for a World Cup team that doesn't field an entire lineup of professional players. (The unpaid players on the U.S. roster include two landscapers, a substitute teacher, a miner and a chiropractor.) The Yanks have gone 1-5 in their two World Cup appearances, in 1987 and '91, and if they are to fulfill their goal of reaching the second round this year, they'll almost certainly have to win twice: against Ireland in their Oct. 2 opener -- in Dublin -- and against Romania. (The Eagles' other opponent in the first-round round-robin is Australia, a tournament favorite.) "We're playing against guys who've played the game since they were five and have every resource," says Lyle. "We don't have that, but we do have a great will." They also have a transcendent player, one who's making from $200,000 to $250,000 a year and has no regrets about dissing the NFL. "No one's going to offer me a million dollars to play American football, and I'd never give up the experiences I've had in rugby," says Lyle. Besides, he has at least two World Cups in his future, and he points out that rugby may reappear in the 2004 Olympics after an 80-year hiatus. "Did you know we're the reigning Olympic champions?" he says. "Paris, 1924. I'll bet nobody in America knows that." Nobody in America knows Dan Lyle, either. The way he's taking over his new sport, that may be about to change. "The first time Dan ran down a kickoff," says Clark, "he was better at it than anyone in the world."
Captain America <h3>Ex-college football player invades English rugby</h3> <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 align=right bgcolor=#cccc99> <tbody> <tr> <td nowrap>
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Posted: Thursday September 30, 1999 07:55 PM <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 align=right> <tbody> <tr valign=top> <td width=10></td> <td width=150>
Dan Lyle believes rugby could be a viable option for many American athletes. <NOBR>David Rogers/Allsport</NOBR></td></tr></tbody></table> LONDON (CNN/SI) -- Dan Lyle is as all-American as they come. The son of a retired two-star general, Lyle starred as a college football tight end at Virginia Military Institute. Despite finishing his career in 1993 as the third leading receiver in school history, Lyle went undrafted so he waited tables while waiting for the NFL to call. It was during that time, Lyle fell in love with --rugby. "American football used to be Rugby Union," Lyle said. "You just look at it as just a combination of probably every game that we play growing up. Soccer, basketball, lacrosse. Rugby and American football they're so similar, in that they combine every physical athletic aspect into one game." By 1994, Lyle was starring for the Eagles, the U.S. National Team. And in 1996 received a non-guaranteed $52,000 offer to play with Bath in England's professional league. At the same time, the Minnesota Vikings offered him a non-guaranteed contract for $116,000. Lyle decided to forego his childhood dream of playing in the NFL, to pursue a rugby career. "It's a great game and you can pick it up late in life and really excel at it so, I'm really happy where I am and enjoying myself." <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 align=left> <tbody> <tr valign=top> <tr> <td>
</td> <td width=10></td></tr></tbody></table> At 6'4, 245 pounds, Lyle combined his physical ability with a crash course in the nuances of the international game. The result was immediate success. Lyle was named the English premiereship's newcomer of the year for the 1996-1997 season prompting the British tabloids to dub him Captain America. "I just want to continuously have people say that America is a team, is a country of great athletes, a country of great camaraderie, teammanship," Lyle said. "We have a great work rate (ethic), that we want to be the upper echelon and we're working toward that every time we step onto the field. And even if I'm representing the U.S. team, Bath or playing you down at the local pub in darts you know, I just try to keep those things in my mind every time I go out." The next season Lyle led Bath to a victory over the French club Brive, to win the European Championship in front of 50,000 fans in Bordeaux, France. Captain America was embraced by the rugby world. <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 align=left> <tbody> <tr valign=top> <td width=220><a target=_top>
</a> Dan Lyle found a career in rugby when American football closed the door on him. <NOBR>CNN/SI</NOBR></td> <td width=10></td></tr></tbody></table> "You know to their credit, they accept you if you're a good player over here," Lyle said. "And that's anyone, whether you're American, Argentinean or you know, from Timbuktu." Lyle, 28, has been supported from all corners including his teammates from the U.S. National Team. "All of the boys have been really supportive of Dan and his efforts as he represents us," says Tom Billups. "And it's really one of our strengths as we compete on the international stages. It's us versus all of them and them in any way, shape or form. We play away, so we don't necessarily get a home game very often, and that's part of our sport right now." Currently Lyle is one of only a handful of Americans playing professional rugby. And for now, he says he has better odds of making it in the English sport than in the NFL. "One percent of one percent of athletes graduating from universities that are playing American football get a chance to play on one of the 31 (NFL) teams," he said. "In the NFL, there are so many athletes out there that are incredible." Lyle earns almost $250,000 a year with Bath, which he concedes might come as a surprise to college football players. They don't pursue rugby because they are only aware of it in its U.S. form, which is purely a sport, not a livelihood. <table bordercolor=#000066 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=3 width=160 align=right border=1> <tbody> <tr bgcolor=#000066> <td>
Page One Mailbag </td></tr> <tr bgcolor=white> <td>Have a question, comment or story idea for Nick Charles, Jim Huber, Sonja Steptoe or the Page One producers? Send a message to our
Page One mailbag and check back often to see if your question is selected. </td></tr></tbody></table> "A lot of people see it at a university. They see guys at a club sport, you know scratching enough funds to go play somewhere, and turn it into something that's a more economically viable sport for people." In fact the United States team that's preparing for this week's Rugby World Cup features several unpaid players, including a substitute teacher, a miner and a chiropractor. That trio will join forces with Captain America in an effort to increase rugby's popularity in the U.S. "I just think there aren't very many things you can pioneer in life anymore and to be able to come over here and represent America, in whatever I'm doing, walking down the street or doing something for the club with some kids, I just want people to understand that I'm not just doing it for myself. I'm doing it for the team and going forth for American rugby." Lyle hopes to continue to play professionally in Europe with his eye on 2004, when rugby could appear in the Olympics for the first time since 1924. As Lyle will quickly remind you, the gold medal winners that year hailed from the United States of America. ----------------- Here is a quote from Dan Lyle in the 2nd article which I think sums up why rugby is not big in the US.
"Lyle earns almost $250,000 a year with Bath, which he concedes might come as a surprise to college football players. They don't pursue rugby because they are only aware of it in its U.S. form, which is purely a sport, not a livelihood." I believe once the pro-rugby comp in America kicks off in 2003 we will see an increased interest in rugby in the US and many of those college gridiron players that missed out on the NFL will start looking at rugby as an alternative career.
