One glance at the Rugby Canada website is enough to gauge some of the problems currently troubling the sport in this country. Under the schedule for the senior men’s 15s tab, three words spell it out: No coming games.
For a side that hasn’t played since a loss to Namibia in Amsterdam last November, and hasn’t competed on home soil in almost a year, getting some test matches on the board is vital to begin resuscitating a program that has seemingly been on life support for much of the past two years, if not longer.
Case in point: When the men’s World Cup kicks off in France this September, it will, for the first time in its 36-year history, do so without a maple leaf anywhere in the draw.
And so, approaching next month’s one-year anniversary of the start of his tenure as Rugby Canada’s CEO, restoring some lustre to the men’s 15s team is one of the most pressing items on Nathan Bombrys’s to-do list.
“That’s the issue,” he said in a phone interview this week. “As it stands today, we have no matches between now and the end of time.”
Though there are some seeds of hope – Bombrys said there should be some announcements on that front in the next week or so – it’s far from ideal for a team ranked 23rd in the world, just one place above its historic low of 24th.
Not that it’s come as any surprise. After two decades in senior leadership roles in European rugby, Bombrys knew he was diving in at the deep end when he took the position last year, and prepared for the choppy waters to come by speaking to “pretty much every high-performance director in the world” about the challenge.
“This is tough,” he said. “What we’re trying to do, it’s not really been done before. And it’s really hard.”
Part of that challenge is trying to establish rugby as a real sporting concern in this country. And that means providing a stable financial footing for the game, as well as competing on the field, too. But the challenge facing Bombrys is exacerbated by the organization’s recent past, too, when last year’s independent review into Rugby Canada’s high-performance programs accused it of “organizational dysfunction.”
It must be noted that the review preceded the hiring of Bombrys, who took a substantial step toward improving that area with the hiring of Stephen Aboud as high-performance director last month.
“Let’s become a strong rugby nation,” Bombrys said. “I think that the ingredients are there. It’s going to take time, it’s going to take a lot of people pulling together. But I like what I see in terms of the opportunity. I really believe we can do something special.”
Some of that is going to depend on Rugby Canada’s “partners,” as Bombrys terms them. Under the guidance of the Michigan native, Rugby Canada recently completed its strategic plan for the next four years. Though he says it’s too early to share any of those targets, he plans to use it as a tool at the Rugby World Cup in the fall to help sell other rugby unions on the merits of the sport in this country and how they might be able to help – by scheduling games against his teams, for instance.
Given the reception he’s been given during his first 12 months in charge – and Canada’s global reputation in the rugby world – Bombrys feels he has reason for optimism.
“I’ve certainly been overwhelmed since taking the job, how much good will there is, amongst other countries, other rugby countries and rugby unions, towards Canada, and towards Rugby Canada,” he said.
Despite the challenges, Bombrys said he has found reasons to be cheerful during his introduction to the sport in this country.
Both the openness of Canada’s rugby community, as well as the level of collaboration between the 15s and sevens teams and programs are positive signs. The other thing? Canada’s women’s 15s team, which finished fourth at the past World Cup, earning itself automatic qualification for the next Women’s World Cup in two years.
Bombrys refers to them as “outstanding,” both as a team and as individuals, but knows the world’s fourth-ranked squad needs help to push on.
“While the women are one of the best teams in the world, to go from where we are now to where we want to get to, there’s a lot of work that still needs to go in and a lot of support,” he said. “You don’t win a World Cup without support.”
Though other countries have suggested to Bombrys that he focus on one program over the other, either the men’s or women’s program, he says that would actually be counterintuitive.
“Why can’t the success of the women help fuel the success of the men?” Bombrys said. “The players that I talk to on both sides of that want each other to be successful.”
Certainly the fact that there isn’t really an culturally established pecking order in this country within the sport of rugby, as there is in other, more popular Canadian sports – and in many of the major sports in Europe – may in fact be to Canada’s advantage.
“We really don’t have that in Canada,” he explained. “We do have [Major League Rugby] and the Arrows and we appreciate that, but that’s not the same thing as playing for a major soccer team yet or it’s not the same thing as the Six Nations because we don’t have that source to feed us.
“The game is really across the board in relatively the same place, kind of financially support wise, and we need to rise both. It’s just what we need to do.”
Another piece of business that Bombrys and Canada need to attend to is the fate of the Canada Sevens, the annual tournament at Vancouver’s B.C. Place, one of 10 global stops on the World Rugby Sevens Series. For next year, World Rugby is cutting the tour down to seven events, and each host country had to rebid in an effort to secure its spots for 2024.
The decision on Vancouver’s future on the tour will be known later this month, but its importance to Canada’s rugby ecosystem cannot be understated.
“Financially, yes, very important, particularly when you don’t have anything else consistently [on the schedule], right?” Bombrys says. “That has historically funded the programs that don’t get the other funding, which is the academy and the women, so it’s critical.”
While it waits on that and any possible fixtures for the men’s 15s team, Rugby Canada is counting down the days until the women’s team plays host to the reigning world champions, New Zealand, in Ottawa on July 8, with another match against Australia a week later as part of the Pacific Four Series.
In a bid to create more rugby fans – as well as giving Canada a real home-field advantage – Rugby Canada has offered free tickets to every schoolkid in the Ottawa region for the game against the Black Ferns.
That’s on top of a coaching program to give more kids a chance to give rugby a go.
“I think it’s going to be about 10,000 kids that will get an opportunity to play rugby through that program,” he said. “What we’d love to be able to do is every time we have an international [game] be able to do something like that, and leave a legacy in that area.”
Events such as next month’s women’s games, and the coming Olympic sevens qualifiers for both the men and women – in Langford, B.C., this August – will all help Bombrys in his mission to place Rugby Canada on a more secure foundation.
“We need to get to a position where we’re financially stable,” he said. “We’re not there yet. We’re working towards that. But that’s going to take support from within the sport, from hopefully government, hopefully World Rugby, but also private support and other institutions to get behind us.”
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