CRAA\u2019s new Director of Women\u2019s Rugby, Tiff Lopez, has some work to do at the top and at the bottom of the ladder.<\/p>\n
From a major collegiate program struggling to find opponents because they are thought to be too powerful () to programs that need help getting on the field, Lopez has a diverse flock to shepherd.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is get teams to buy back into CRAA and help them get into more of a full-time environment,\u201d Lopez told GRR, who has worked as a Conference Commissioner in D2, and as a manager of the USA Women\u2019s National Team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Taking the Top of the Pyramid Higher<\/p>\n
\u201cI am all about what coached such as Katie [Dowty at Dartmouth] and Mel [Denham at Harvard] do, and what we want to do in CRAA is have non-NCAA programs have that level of competition,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cYou look at a team such as Cal Poly, which was in the conference I ran. We just built out a five-year plan with that program. They are moving up now and we want to elevate those kinds of programs. We have to give teams more resources and opportunities for them to go from a club team to a high-performance team.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lopez is working hard to get Penn State back to the level they played at some years ago, and working with the likes of BYU, also.<\/p>\n
And part of that was opening the door to them playing in NCR\u2019s fall competition and playoff structure. Why? More 15s games.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to play more games and more tough games,\u201d she said. \u201cLooking at what Australia and New Zealand do, their college programs are playing a minimum of 16 games in a season as well as having a preseason. In American colleges we\u2019re just not playing enough rugby. Three games and getting into a championship playoff is not enough. If we play more high-level games we also recruit more players who want to compete at that college level. We need more cross-pollination in rugby, too. Last year we had Princeton play at Stanford for a challenger game. That was good for both.\u201d<\/p>\n
CRAA\u2019s women\u2019s competition is all over the map, but heavily on the West Coast, and Lopez said she feels there\u2019s an opportunity there to launch a Golden Coast Series, where division or conference divides don\u2019t matter so much. That jibes with the idea of having teams play in the fall and in the spring, and jibes also with a more porous wall between CRAA and NCR.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we continue to divide then none of this is going to get better,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need a true National Champion, but regional champions. We\u2019re not seeing who the top dog is and if we continue to divide none of this is going to get better. So the question is, are we playing for a trophy or are we playing for better rugby throughout the country. We\u2019re hosting a [Women\u2019s] World Cup in eight years. We want to be able to start scouting from a better pool of players now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
NCR, Lopes said, \u201chas created a product people want to be a part of; their presentation their media are very strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
But competitively, many very powerful college teams are on the West Coast. Playing through fall and spring at the highest level can include those teams if there\u2019s the will to do that.<\/p>\n
Helping the Base<\/p>\n
All of that is at the top of the competitive heap, but what about elsewhere? What about teams that are struggling? A competition, one could argue, is only as good as it\u2019s least-successful member.<\/p>\n
\u201cFixing rugby is always a the-chicken-or-the-egg problem,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cPeople will buy into one. One of the things we did in my conference was look at teams that weren\u2019t producing numbers. Saint Mary\u2019s used to be a huge program. And the fact that they weren\u2019t getting those numbers anymore was irking me. So we looked at it and said \u2018let\u2019s give you a competition.\u2019 We started them playing 10s.\u201d<\/p>\n
That allowed Saint Mary\u2019s to play a form of rugby that was close to 15s and allowed them to be able to field a squad with a roster of 16 or so. They started to come back.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was the egg,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cThen I said \u2018next year I need you to be in 15s.\u2019 We\u2019re going forward to more 15s-centric training. They\u2019re getting fans to come out. I\u2019m optimistic that they\u2019re going to have a 15s teams. But we created this competition whereby adding 10s we get small teams stronger, and then they move up. We could then reach out to more smaller colleges and get them into 10s training, and get more rugby played.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CRAA\u2019s new Director of Women\u2019s Rugby, Tiff Lopez, has some work to do at the top and at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-58296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}