City of Glendale Shifts Resources to National Level

THIS IS A DEVELOPING STORY and will be updated as more information and sources are made available.

Last week, Your Scrumhalf Connection broke the news that the Glendale Merlins’ two women’s teams – the reigning Women’s Premier League national champion and Division I – were being cut from the City of Glendale’s budget. TRB connected with Glendale Director of Rugby Mark Bullock, who wrote:

The budget for the women’s rugby teams has been cut for 2021 by the City. The reasons are a bit complicated but, Glendale will be involved with USA [R]ugby in a more substantial manner while still funding a professional program.*

Bullock then redirected inquiries to Glendale City Manager Linda Cassaday, who is “better equipped to discuss the reasons for the City to adjust its funding priorities,” Bullock added. (*At the end of the article, read Cassaday’s clarifying comments re: men’s rugby going forward.)

Cassaday explained that the City of Glendale is redirecting resources from the local to the national level, and emphasized that its support of rugby has not changed.

“This [shift] doesn’t indicate that we’re not continuing to support women’s rugby,” Cassaday said. “But it does change focus to assisting the national team and not having a local team.

“Same with the men’s program,” Cassaday continued. “When we pulled out of the MLR with the Raptors, we wanted to focus on helping develop U.S. players to play at the national level.”

The City’s view of the MLR prompted discussions on the overall allocation of resources, and these conversations evolved during the last several months.

“This is not in any way directly impacted by COVID,” Cassaday said. “We’ve been looking at what we’re doing with our rugby program. It’s all funded through taxpayer dollars so how are we best using those dollars? … Through those discussions it was made clear that we were continuing to put resources toward having an MLR team here, when the MLR, for their own reasons, focused more on foreign than domestic players. Having some future partnership with USA Rugby allows us to really focus on the development of the national teams, which is a critical piece to us.”

Cassaday asserted that USA Rugby was not aware of the City’s budget conversations. In other words, it wasn’t a trade – one WPL team for more Women’s National Team support.

“USA Rugby didn’t have any idea that we were making this decision in terms of the WPL,” Cassaday said. “That was strictly a City decision for financial purposes.”

So what does that mean for the Glendale Merlins moving forward?

“We’re giving $50,000 seed capital to assist in the transition of setting up their own team and will continue to work with them in the use of training facilities and donating equipment,” said Cassaday, who also forecast potentially tough decisions ahead.

“We had budgeted a certain amount for 2020 with the women’s program but with the potential change in schedule, moving from the fall to the spring season, that created a challenge for us because we weren’t intending to move forward in 2021,” Cassaday said. “We told the team leadership that we’ll look at what we budgeted for 2020 and provide as much as we can – keep in mind that this is a taxpayer-supported entity and we’ll have a $3 million decrease in sales taxes this year. It’s a significant loss because of COVID-19 but we know it’s an expensive proposition to rebrand and get new kit and equipment and fund travel.”

The team is waiting for some concrete information so that it can start planning for the future. Just yesterday, the WPL announced the postponement of the 2020 season, which was slated to begin Aug. 29.

Cassaday expects that a press release regarding the City of Glendale and USA Rugby’s new relationship will circulate this week. The national office is relocating from Lafayette, Colo., and Glendale is also looking to aid that move.

“The thing that is lost is that Glendale is really supportive of women’s rugby,” Cassaday said. “We are supportive of the HSBC tournament, which is an enormously expensive event, but we choose to bring it here and really have been advocates of keeping that a women’s-only tournament instead of combining with the men’s tournament like other places in the world. We think the women’s game needs that specific attention and it can get lost when it’s combined with the men’s tournament. And we like that it’s just the women who are competing here. It’s not going away but it’s an incredible financial investment by the City to continue to host that tournament.”

To clarify, the USA Women’s 7s, the first stop on the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series for the women, won’t occur this year due to the rescheduling of the Hong Kong and Singapore stops from the spring to October. Otherwise, the 2020-21 season would have begun before the 2019-20 season concluded. The tournament will, however, return to Glendale in October 2021.

“We have not pulled support for women’s rugby; we’re just redirecting that support,” Cassaday recapped. “We feel strongly about the development of rugby in this country and put city resources – which are taxpayer resources – toward it, and we’ll continue to do so.”

* Cassaday re: Glendale men’s program:

“Our intent is to bring in US athletes who can train on a year-round basis to play, hopefully, with the national team and even within Major League Rugby. That developmental program will require housing, food, etc., but I would not describe it as a ‘professional’ team. Also, we have not yet determined at what level the players within that program will compete, whether that is via a league such as the PRP or in a series of friendlies with collegiate teams, etc.”