I'm by no means a spokesman for the team, just an old fill-in player against guys twice my size and half my age... so please don't take this as an official position, just my take.
I see us very much as an expansion team. We're a fair way from being involved in a regular East Coast comp, representative selection etc, so that's not the motivation, but the long-term potential is there. I doubt there are too many places in the US where you train near schools where almost every day of the week there are rugby teams training after school. As billy2 said, it is a lot to do with the Polynesian population here, but there's plenty of other guys who've come up through rugby schools as well. The guys I play with have the real natural passing & running skills like you'd find back in Australia, it's just learning league and teamwork and tackling... and we have a great coach to do that.
Anyway, I know it was a real tough choice, and done with a lot of regret too, it's not in our nature. But we have had a team training twice a week all year, promising games, but not much chance of a full-on game in the immediate future, due to the distance. Through our own fault we didn't represent well at the 9s, due to cost and players flying out too late/getting caught by the weather, and again the USARL teams helped us there which we were grateful for. But after that tournament was finished, most of the rest of 2011 is focused on the East Coast, and our regional options were shrinking.
This gives us potential for several games this year and beyond. Obviously you don't take anything for granted, and I know not everything will work out perfectly. I know we hope to play against a Hawaiian team, Chicago etc, and any other games are a bonus. Any well-promoted home game in Utah should draw a big crowd from the local rugby community (there were 15,000 for the college rugby final at Rio Tinto Stadium... though we're not quite expecting that!). But that's the main hope for this year, show that this sport is actually real, and a lot better than bloody boring rugby! Even just one game will make the difference.
Again, I'm putting words in mouths here, but I think everyone out here just hope things get sorted agan, and we can focus on playing footy. So that in 2 years or so we *can* be involved in some form of regular competition.
