UCLA made headlines last week by announcing its move to National Collegiate Rugby for the next school year, becoming the highest-profile, highest-division West Coast team to join NCR. Following the Bruins a week later are Division I-AA Arkansas, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State.
Since COVID, the college rugby offseason has become the membership tug-of-war season, with teams annually reevaluating the right home. At the heart of that decision is a simple question – spend $90 and get $40 in value, or spend $90 and get $90 in value?
When you throw into one pot every rumor, hot take or opinion you’ve heard about the game’s organizational alphabet soup, and boil out all the crap, for most, that’s the quandary at the core of the quarrel over college rugby.
Collegiate rugby membership is separated into three buckets; National Collegiate Rugby (NCR), Collegiate Rugby Association of America (CRAA), and the National Intercollegiate Rugby Association (NIRA). CRAA and NIRA are sanctioned by the national governing body, USA Rugby, and their members are also paying members of USA Rugby.
NIRA is open only to NCAA varsity women’s programs, and as such, largely remains uninvolved in the membership tug-of-war, though an increasing number of NCAA emerging teams are participating in NCR’s championship pathways throughout the year. Over half of the NCAA teams compete in NCR’s Collegiate Rugby Championship.
For disclosure – I am the director of content for NCR, the largest membership organization in college rugby and home to about 85-percent of active collegiate membership last season. NCR is also the lone national membership organization not sanctioned by USA Rugby, and as such, their members aren’t necessarily paying members of USA Rugby, unless they choose to dual register on their own.
Registration costs vary, depending in part, on which conference you belong to and if they charge player dues, and how much, at the time of registration. Or, if you’re in NCR, depending on which membership plan you choose. And “team fees” vary between organizations, though mostly nominally when factored into the grand scheme of cost per player. However, the “national fees” and baseline registration costs and structures are largely universal within each organization, so the comparisons made herein are applicable across the country.
Let’s zoom in on the state of Kansas, for our example, as the Jayhawks and Wildcats are two of seven teams joining NCR from CRAA’s now-former Heart of America Conference, which sat on the geographical frontlines of the membership war.
Heart of America players paid $92.52 to register for the 2025/2026 school year. $20 went to the conference, $20 went to CRAA, $3.52 went to “RX Systems” the membership platform, and $49 went to USA Rugby’s national office. That same player in NCR would pay $90, with all $90 going to NCR’s $3.5 million budget dedicated solely to college rugby.
Being generous and assuming the conferences, CRAA and NCR all maximize every membership dollar they receive, the dynamic variable is USA Rugby’s “national fee” of $49. Since conferences largely run the regular season, and CRAA and NIRA run the postseasons and populate the all powerful “College Rugby Council,” the overwhelming majority of the player experience on the sanctioned side of the fence is run on less than half of the fee students pay to play the game.
The return on the onerous national fee is tougher to identify. Outside a handful of social media reels during the championship months of April and May, it’s hard to find direct value.
Loyalists tout exclusive access to the national team pathways, but national team and age-grade roster announcement after roster announcement with NCR representation blows a hole in that argument. Further, age-grade teams are far from fully funded by these dues, as they largely exist on the back of social media crowdfunding and pay-to-play models.
Loyalists will claim exclusive permission to tour internationally, yet NCR clubs cross borders every year without issue.
They’ll claim access to better referees, but in Kansas, like most of the country, there’s a referee shortage. Only so many people can run each weekend, and they’ll officiate whatever rugby they want to. There are no separate pools of “CRAA” refs versus “NCR” refs, though there may well be a few one-off loyalists or individuals with personal proclivities.
They’ll tout coach and player development, but coach and referee certification and development programming is not included in the price of USAR/CRAA/NIRA membership and all comes with additional a la carte costs. NCR members commonly pay “referee development” fees directly to local referee organizations, and collectively, NCR colleges pay $1.3 million in referee match and development fees annually.
While 53 cents of every USA Rugby sanctioned membership dollar leaves college rugby with no clear return, every penny of NCR’s membership dollar stays specifically in the college game. USA Rugby loyalists are quick to point out the size of NCR’s payroll, as if it’s silver-bullet proof of malfeasance or waste. Would you prefer a product or experience where more of your dollar goes into quality and service, or less?
Where does that national fee go, anyway (you can find NCR’s fund allocation here)? Without access to USA Rugby’s detailed ledger, it’s tough to say with exact accuracy, but assuredly at least some funnels to the national teams, men and women, senior and age grade. There’s definitely value for college rugby in having national teams to aspire to, but at what cost?
Getting back to Kansas, let’s look at what high school and adult rugby players pay for their rugby and national teams in comparison to CRAA members. Adults in Kansas paid $109 to register, with $40 going to the Mid-America Rugby Football Union, $20 to the Senior Club Council, and $45 in a “national fee” to USA Rugby, and the rest to RX. So, 41 cents of every adult registration dollar went to USA Rugby, and 55 cents went back into the direct player experience.
Kansas high schoolers paid $130.98, with $85 going to Rugby Kansas, $11 to the Youth and High School Council, and $30 to USA Rugby via the “national fee”. 73 cents of every high school registration dollar went back into the player experience, and just 23 cents left the game for the “national fee”.
When you rank the value proposition of registering to play NCR, CRAA, high school or adult club rugby in America, the hierarchy is clear – CRAA members pay the most in national fees and get the lowest return on their membership dollar in actual services.
Many of the reasons why CRAA members accept such disparity in value on their dollar, versus joining NCR, have been laid out – perceived “access” to HP pathways, “better” refereeing, coach and referee development, etc.
The real 800-pound gorilla, for an elite, deep-pocketed few, is seasonality – an existential competitive issue for many on the West Coast. The sum of those ardently against any shift in seasonality is enough to keep a few other elite programs in the Midwest and on the East Coast aboard and the enterprise afloat.
It’s understandable why some programs are OK with paying more for less to stay in CRAA versus NCR. Unclear, however, is why college rugby players, their parents, and the coaches who tell them where to register (i.e. who to pay), are OK with paying USA Rugby more for less than BOTH their adult and high school counterparts, for the same national teams and essentially the same benefits.
On top of the disparity in value propositions, also factoring into UCLA’s decision to join NCR is the FirstPoint USA Scholars Cup, an elite four-team mid-season competition featuring the Bruins, Brown, Notre Dame and Dartmouth. The deal represents one of the largest sponsorship commitments to college rugby since Penn Mutual was pumping $1 million a year into the Collegiate Rugby Championship nearly a decade ago.
It signals that not only do NCR members pay essentially the same for much, much more, the organization is capable of not just collecting value from membership dues and being a good steward of it, but capturing outside value from corporate sponsors and bringing it into the game. The six-figure, mult-year deal will subsidize travel and media coverage for the competition.
It also feels like what should be just the tip of the sponsorship iceberg, if college rugby were to somehow package itself into one organization in lieu of competing against itself for attention and sponsorship. For now, though, college rugby realignment isn’t driven by millions in broadcasting and corporate deals, but rather in the dollars and cents of player registration.