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\n Gary Gold, the former U.S. rugby coach, wants the sport to target basketballers who do not make the NBA (Mike Hewitt \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
David Hodges has been asking himself the same question. The former U.S. captain, who represented his country 54 times before transitioning to a high-performance coaching role in 2004, argues that they cannot simply borrow the development model of South Africa, New Zealand or England. The sporting landscapes are fundamentally different.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve always taken a rugby approach to making rugby players,\u201d he says. \u201cThat isn\u2019t necessarily the American approach.\u201d<\/p>\n
In countries where\u00a0rugby sits close to the top of the sporting food chain<\/a>, the best young athletes often find their way into the game naturally. In America, they are dispersed across basketball, football, baseball, wrestling and several other sports long before rugby enters the conversation. Waiting for fully formed rugby players, Hodges believes, is waiting for something that rarely exists. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the depth,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n That is particularly true for specific positions such as lock forward, traditionally the physical engine room of a rugby team \u2014 providing pushing power in the scrum and height in a lineout. \u201cBig guys just aren\u2019t drawn to the sport,\u201d Hodges adds.<\/p>\n Much of this thinking has already filtered into the women\u2019s pathway. Irene Gardner, USA Rugby\u2019s women\u2019s sevens pathway coach, says basketball has become one of the sports they actively monitor during talent identification. At a recent pathway camp, eight of the 27 athletes came from basketball backgrounds, while Olympic bronze medallist Stephanie Rovetti only picked up rugby after playing Division I basketball.<\/p>\n \n U.S. rugby star Stephanie Rovetti started her sporting career in basketball (Chet Strange \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n \u201cThe use of both hands in dribbling helps when learning passing in rugby,\u201d Gardner explains. \u201cReceiving passes and going to get rebounds helps develop hand-eye coordination and an early catch skill in rugby. They\u2019re also really good under high balls and in the lineout because they\u2019re used to meeting the ball above their heads. The more I see basketball converts play rugby, the more similar the sports appear.\u201d<\/p>\n Kristin Zdanczewicz, USA Rugby\u2019s lead performance coach for the women\u2019s pathway, reaches the same conclusion from a physiological perspective. Acceleration, deceleration, repeated sprint ability, reactive agility, lower-body power, coordination, balance; these athletic qualities are already present. The challenge is layering rugby-specific skills on top.<\/p>\n Luke Gross understands the theory better than most because he lived it. Long before he won 62 caps for the Eagles between 1996 and 2003 and was part of the U.S. squad at three Rugby World Cups, Gross was a 6ft 9in (206cm) basketball player at Marshall University who had barely heard of rugby. He stumbled across the sport as a 24-year-old after renting rooms in his house to members of the university team. \u201cI was a confused rugby player playing basketball,\u201d he laughs.<\/p>\n Looking back, the signs were there. Gross wasn\u2019t a prolific scorer. He describes himself as \u201ca banger,\u201d happier doing the dirty work than filling up the points column. He also happened to hold Marshall\u2019s single-season record for fouls, a statistic that perhaps made the transition to rugby less surprising than it first appears.<\/p>\n His first serious coach, the legendary Jack Clark, recognised that he was dealing with an athlete rather than a rugby player. Rather than overwhelm Gross with systems and set plays, Clark simplified everything.<\/p>\n \u201cHe put me in a box,\u201d says Gross, who represented elite clubs in England, Wales and Italy. \u201cYou do your lineouts. You do your kick-offs. You get the ball, you run forward. Somebody runs at you, you tackle them. I could make the switch because I didn\u2019t complicate things.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Rugby skills like lineout catching should come easily to basketball players (Shaun Botterill \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n Gross, now the head coach of the men\u2019s rugby team at Indiana University, agrees that Gold is onto something, but he also offers a note of caution. Basketball develops vision, movement and spatial awareness. It does not teach collisions.<\/p>\n \u201cCrossover athletes are not the answer,\u201d he says. \u201cBasketball might be physical, but there is no comparison to getting hammered in a tackle. However, this could be part of the answer.\u201d<\/p>\n That distinction matters. USA Rugby has spent decades punching below the weight suggested by its population, wealth and sporting infrastructure. The U.S. should not lack athletes. It should not lack size, speed or ambition. Yet too often, it has lacked the machinery to turn those raw materials into international rugby players.<\/p>\n Aside from rugby\u2019s fringe status, the sheer size of the U.S. makes it difficult to build coherent pathways. Basketball offers scholarships, prestige and professional opportunities to far more athletes than rugby can.<\/p>\n The outlook is changing. Successful sevens programmes are on the rise, fuelled by the allure of Olympic medals<\/a>, and there are home World Cups in 2031 (men)<\/a> and 2033 (women)<\/a>, giving the sport a sharper selling point. But if rugby wants to keep up with the rest of the pack, it cannot wait for athletes to stumble across the game. It has to go looking.<\/p>\n Gold\u2019s courtside vision was never really about LeBron or Giannis. It was about the player sitting further down the bench. The one whose basketball career ends at 22. The one who can jump, pass, move, compete and see space, but has never been handed an oval ball.<\/p>\n All across America, those players exist. Rugby just has to find them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gary Gold was sitting courtside at Crypto.com Arena in February 2022 when he had an epiphany. The South…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":826297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,2331,11880,1418,590,10018,85,3276,41526],"class_list":["post-826296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-culture","tag-global-sports","tag-mens-college-basketball","tag-nba","tag-olympics","tag-sports","tag-sports-business","tag-womens-college-basketball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826296","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=826296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-1052622966-scaled-e1784806330118.jpg\")
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