The Regional Cup Tournaments (RCT) are great scouting venues and billed as the primary means by which athletes can be invited to the Stars & Stripes camp, which brings 100 of the top girls and boys high school players together for a week of elite development. Some of the better attended events – Mid-Atlantic (Pittsburgh Challenge), West (Rocky Mountain Challenge), Pacific Northwest (Great Northwest Challenge) – were existing, successful all-star tournaments that were rebranded as RCTs. When those regional competitions were first created, the goal was to expose driven players to a higher level of play against a variety of opponents – experiences that hopefully followed them back to their home clubs and positively affect the standard of play in their nook of the country – in addition to getting noticed. But now not every region and age group are so lucky.

California has the best talent in the country. Fallbrook, Danville, Pleasanton, and Sacramento when it’s healthy, are all top-tier teams, and yet no one outside of the state will be playing the all-star teams to which they contribute players. The Southwest RCT is being held in Bakersfield, Calif., but with RCTs also being held in Oregon and Colorado, it didn’t make sense logistically for Washington, Oregon, or Utah to attend. That means that only SoCal and NorCal are competing in Bakersfield this weekend.

“It would have been very beneficial to girls rugby to have one solid tournament on the west coast,” wrote Griffins Girls head coach Ravi Perera. “I would have loved to go to Oregon and play all the teams, like in previous years.”

Last year, SoCal and NorCal traveled to the Great Northwest Challenge and played JV and varsity teams from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho for a much more fulfilling weekend. And those teams got to test themselves against some of the best players in the country. It was a win-win. Additionally, although the Southwest RCT will be treated with the respect it deserves, the effort required to produce such an event does not correlate with the number of teams attending.

In terms of player development and exposure, that same sensitivity is lacking in the eligibility requirements. Only juniors and seniors can compete on varsity teams, while only sophomores and freshmen can participate on junior varsity teams. For those RCTs that are not contesting a JV division – and there are several – 10^th graders can “play up” on the varsity squad, but 9^th graders cannot and are therefore ineligible to compete at all.

There are so many examples of underclassmen being some of the best players on their home club – sophomore twins Tiana and Tiara A’au (Grant, Ore.), sophomore Lilly Durbin (Fallbrook, Calif.), freshman Emily Henrich (Orchard Park, N.Y.) – who have played in state championships or touring select sides against international competition, or even represented the USA Junior All Americans against Canada last summer. What benefit can be gleaned from playing on a JV team? And those ultra-talented freshmen who were prohibited from attending an RCT, will they be excluded from consideration of the Stars & Stripes camp as well?

Certainly there are other motivations at play – alignment with state interscholastic athletic associations, for example – that are seeking other worthy goals, and at the end of the day, the Regional Cup Tournament circuit is valuable. Hopefully the layout will be tweaked so that all portions of the country and every age group can benefit in the future.

For a look at all of the RCT rosters, click here.