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The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/sports/15rugby.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Colorado City Finds a Sales Pitch in a Rugby Pitch
By JOHN BRANCH
Published: July 14, 2009
GLENDALE, Colo. The conference room next to the mayors office overlooks the well-mowed pitch of the countrys only municipal rugby stadium. Infinity Park could hold almost all 4,800 citizens of this tiny urban island, an enclave surrounded by the city of Denver and best known if thought about at all for its concentration of multifamily housing, big-box retailers and topless clubs.
Mayor Larry Harte said: Were trying to make people proud of living in Glendale.
A bookshelf, mostly empty, held a few copies of Rugby for Dummies.
At a map on the wall, Mayor Larry Harte pointed to plans to reshape Glendale not its borders, but its image. Long known as the strip-club capital of Colorado, Glendale now wants to be the rugby capital of the United States.
Were trying to create a real identity for what Glendale is, said Harte, wearing shorts, a shaved head and an infectious enthusiasm. That trickles down to getting people wanting to live here, and wanting to shop and play and hang out. Were trying to make people proud of living in Glendale.
When the area around city hall was being redeveloped a few years ago, discussion turned to a patch that long held a softball field. Should it remain a softball field? Become a soccer field or a football field?
Mike Dunafon, the mayor pro tem whose personality can hardly be constrained by the citys tight borders, suggested rugby.
After all, rugby is one of the worlds most popular sports, even if it is considered in this country to be largely a club game, played on leafy college campuses or by burly, sweaty people on the far edges of the park.
Besides, the thinking went, every American town seems to have soccer and softball fields. Name one with a municipal rugby pitch.
In the marketing of anything, we search for a brand, Dunafon said. And I thought, in this country, Id never seen rugby used as a brand.
It is no secret here that Dunafons common-law wife, Debbie Matthews, is the owner of Shotgun Willies, a well-known topless club that sits at a busy Glendale intersection, a few blocks from the new rugby stadium.
If nothing else, that connection demonstrates the entwined politics of a small city, the diversity of its business interests and most strikingly the seemingly incongruous marriage between rugby and Glendale, a 355-acre city (roughly one mile by one-half mile) with three single-family homes, two strip clubs and one church.
One night last month, as the United States womens rugby team played a match against Canada, the marquee at Shotgun Willies declared the day Amateur Strip Off Tuesday, and promoted a future Best Breast in the West competition.
The crowd might have been bigger at Shotgun Willies that night, no thanks to a vicious thunderstorm that lingered past dusk. But it could do nothing to dampen the new-found enthusiasm for rugby.
The $8 million stadium opened in the fall of 2007. It is part of a $40 million project that includes a recreation center and events center on the north side of the stadium, with second-floor rooms that double as luxury suites for rugby matches. There is an artificial-turf practice pitch nearby, part of a park still under construction.
The stadium pitch is surrounded by 10 rows of concrete bleachers set above grass berms. A huge scoreboard and video screen are on one end. Concessions are sold at The Grubber Grille and The Shopping Maul on the other. The end lines are backed by sponsor advertising local hotels and fitness companies, mostly, but also Bushmills and Guinness.
The stadium is home to a Division I rugby club called the Glendale Raptors. This year, it has also held national club championships, collegiate all-star games and various international matches, most of them aired to surprising numbers on cable television and streamed across the Internet.
USA Rugby has used Infinity Park for weeks at a time for training camp. For several mornings last month, the stadium was filled with hundreds of children from summer camps learning to pass, scrum and maul.
The stadiums premier event to date was Junes Churchill Cup, featuring national teams from the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Argentina and Georgia. Wicked thunderstorms and tornado sightings plagued the event, but 4,000 people packed the stadium for one raucous session. Players and coaches gave the site rave reviews, comparing it favorably to others around the world.
Infinity Parks $8 million stadium opened in the fall of 2007 and is part of a $40 million project. It is home to a Division I rugby club, the Glendale Raptors.
Most Glendale officials had not seen rugby in person until the stadium was built and are still learning the rules and terminology of the game. They seem smitten.
I truly believed it would be successful, said Dunafon, a former football player who embraced rugby years ago in the British Virgin Islands as a better alternative for fans and participants. I did not believe it would be this successful this fast.
The stadium was designed as an image maker, not a moneymaker. Then again, neither are parks or softball fields. Stadium operations were budgeted at $1.6 million this year. Glendale expects revenues of about $500,000, according to Linda Cassaday, the deputy city manager and finance director.
The end game is for the stadium to not be a big cost center for the city, said Cassaday, who is hoping to lift revenue mostly through sponsorships. We would like, within the next three to five years, to be offsetting those costs 100 percent.
There are no plans to augment the schedule with soccer, football, lacrosse or any other sports that would fit nicely on the pitch and add money to the coffers. Glendale wants Infinity Park to be a rugby stadium, not a stadium that has rugby. One exception: Monday night movies, shown on the big screen to people sitting on the grass.
Mark Bullock worked many years for USA Rugby. He is now Glendales director of rugby probably the only city employee in the country with that title and coach of the Raptors. He increasingly fields calls from other cities, pondering their own turn toward rugby.
Ideally, weve created a model, Bullock said.
That is what rugby boosters hope. After decades of seeing rugby scrumming for attention along the fringes of American sports culture, they are thrilled to have a community centerpiece to call their own.
Its certainly a milestone a purposely built rugby stadium is a great indication that rugby is growing in the United States, Nigel Melville, the president of USA Rugby, said. There are about 85,000 registered rugby players in the country, he added, 35 percent of them women. And the numbers are growing quickly.
In some ways, rugby is trying to catch hold in the opposite direction of soccer. Rugby players tend to discover the game in college and play it as adults; soccer players tend to begin as children and give up playing as they get older.
Ed Hagerty, the executive editor of Rugby magazine, said there were 2,600 rugby clubs in the United States, including 811 at the high school level. The sport is finally taking root at youth levels, he said.
Im going to be six feet under when it blooms, he said. But its going.
Glendale hopes to bloom with it. The city has no place to grow and its population is already densely packed, by the Denver areas sprawling standards. The borders with Denver are so fuzzy and convoluted that some cut right through condominium complexes, unbeknownst to residents living there.
Glendales western edge is Colorado Boulevard, the busiest street in the state, lined on the Glendale side with one of the countrys highest-volume Target stores, a Home Depot, several strip malls and office buildings and Shotgun Willies.
Glendale has always been family friendly, Dunafon said. People havent always seen it that way. They see sin on the corner. Why in the world would we not want this false branding to go away? Thats what started this whole thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/sports/15rugby.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
