ABSTRACT
Women’s rugby has struggled to gain a foothold in the United States, despite the US women’s rugby team winning the very first Women’s Rugby World Cup in 1991. After that remarkable early success, the US women have not won a medal since 1998 and finished only fifth in the debut of women’s Olympic rugby in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Despite growth at the collegiate, club and high-school level for female rugby players in the United States over the last five decades, rugby has never reached National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship status in the country. In this chapter, we draw upon previous ethnographic work, media coverage and archival materials to discuss the historical development and growth of women’s rugby within the United States. We focus on two major factors that we believe have negatively impacted of the growth of women’s rugby in the United States: the inability to achieve championship NCAA status and the lack of media coverage of rugby in the country.
