The Falcon 7s occurs this weekend in Little Rock, Ark., but the event is much more than a rugby tournament for high school and senior players. American Rugby Pro Training Center (ARPTC) has welcomed varsity and club college recruiters, Premier Rugby 7s scouts, as well as national team coaches for a showcase rooted in quality, not quantity.
There are nine teams in the high school division, and they range from National Development Academy (NDA), to state all-star team, to top-flight club. Provisional rankings have divided the field into two pools of five, and Saturday’s games will reorganize the field into Sunday’s knockouts. The club division is four teams: host ARPTC with its residents; ARPTC USA, which is eight Chula Vista residents; Northeast Academy, an NDA; and the CRC 7s Selects side, which is all collegiate players.
“We really want to build a competitive tournament — not one where you have three lopsided matches to get to a parity matchup. That’s a quantity tournament,” ARPTC founder and Falcon 7s director Jules McCoy said. “But you never know who’s going to show up, and on any given day, a club team could be better than an academy team, so why would you keep [a club team] out of an elite division? Let teams play into the elite, or out of it.”
The event has drawn USA U18 head coach Martha Daines; Katie Dowty, head coach for the USA U23s and Dartmouth College; and scouts from 11 more NCAA varsity and competitive club colleges around the country. All of the recruiters will be sequestered to one area on the grounds, and they’ll get updated roster and jersey numbers for each match, while the off-site viewers will have access to the live-stream via ARPTC’s Facebook page. And with only nine teams and two fields, the college scouts will see how individuals handled themselves across a whole weekend, compared to the exposure that a combine or 120-team tournament might provide. From 2-4 p.m. Sunday, coaches, players and parents will have the opportunity to mingle at the college fair.
ARPTC is also an official partner of Premier Rugby 7s (PR7s), and the new professional league will be in Arkansas scouting for talent.
“They’re looking to build a cadre of athletes that they can depend on for 2022,” McCoy said. “They’re doing one venue first, like a soft opening, to see what it looks like and to get the kinks out, which is smart.”
PR7s will be watching the high school games for some radar additions, but there’s likely more interest in the senior division. McCoy felt the ARPTC veterans – those residents who report to Little Rock every summer and know the game — are in a good position to be picked up by PR7s.
“They want people who graduated from college already and high school girls that might never have wanted to go college. Maybe she wanted a family instead,” McCoy said. “You want to stay away from the college girls because there are eligibility problems and stuff like that. And we don’t want to ruin college girls’ career paths by playing a six-week pro tournament one time in their lives. A lot of time has gone into developing the NCAA teams and stuff like that, and people can’t compete with that. As a women’s group, we can’t compete with that. We shouldn’t put a girl in that situation where she has to choose. They’re trying to avoid what happened with the MLR, where college guys were poached to play pro. There were some problems with that. We’re going to counsel you.”
McCoy indicated that ARPTC, Premier Rugby 7s and USA Rugby Women’s HP Manager Emilie Bydwell are coordinating on the front end.
“We don’t want to destroy the pathway for women,” McCoy said of the various entities working together. “The way to grow girls’ rugby is the carrot of NCAA college rugby and scholarships. I’m dealing with that now. I’m trying to build up girls’ high school rugby in Arkansas and it’s, ‘Why would I play rugby? Are there scholarships in college?’ If you say, ‘Yes,’ then it’s, ‘OK, I’ll add that to the list of sports I’m already doing. So we don’t want [pro rugby] to be a roadblock in that pathway. I think we can do it simultaneously — stay on the long-term growth pathway and also have pro.”
Interested in watching the games live? Tune into ARPTC’s Facebook Page and stay tuned for follow-up coverage.