Getting the basics nailed down is a common issue within the game of rugby, and certainly it is true in rugby tournaments.

The organizers of the USA Rugby 7s Collegiate Championships held a virtual info session last week and the meeting touched on big ideas—TV coverage (not just streaming), a high-level venue, player welfare, and building some high-performance foundations.

Much of this has some excitement attached to it—USA Rugby High Performance Director Dan Payne spoke about how the next group of Olympians would come from this tournament, for example. Bernie Mullin of Aspire Group, which is a marketing company for college sports, talked about taking college rugby events to a higher level. 

All of this is exciting, but there are other basic elements that college rugby teams worry about. There were several questions submitted about some of the basic details, so detailed, really, that they couldn't be addressed on a Zoom call. So we decided to look at some of those questions.

Qualification

We'll get our failure out first. We can't tell you exactly how everyone qualifies. There are some conference tournaments that have been tagged as qualifiers. Some have even been played. But with each division and each conference often having their qualifications left up their own plans. So, we're working on it. What we can tell you is there will be an invitational aspect to this because some teams are playing 15s into playoffs into May. 

Invitations into a national tournament, of course, are not rare—that's most of the NCAA basketball tournament, the NCAA hockey tournament, and even the football championship is based on rankings, not an all-encompassing playoff. We will see a combination.

In the Men's D1A bracket, because of the 15s playoffs there will be some conference qualification, but some other teams won't be able to play those in time. So, currently, seven of the top 10-ranked D1A teams have committed to attend. We're in a similar situation with D1 Elite teams.

Cars, Beds, and Plates

As we talked about previously, the teams will have a ticket allocation they are expected to sell. But the tournament provides accommodation, food, and ground transportation. 

Teams will be picked up from the airport and taken to the campus of Kennesaw State University. They will be transported from their accommodations to practice fields (and back) and then also to and from the competition fields. They will also be taken back to the airport once it's all over.

Players will be housed in dorms at Kennesaw State University, the dorms are about two miles from the practice and competition fields, so the trip is short.

The KSU food services will be feeding the players, either at the dining facility or, during competition, at the fields. 

Player Welfare

One of the key issues for these tournaments is finding a place for players to rest, eat, recover, and get out of the sun. There will be a huge area for teams at this tournament. It will be tents—that's standard—but they will be set up for teams and in a place where they aren't crammed in there. Having a place where players can rest and can easily get there was one of the biggest issues for the old CRC, where you often saw players sleeping under the stands or eating hot dogs in the sun. Neither was ideal.

Medical and athletic trainers are also on-site.

Who Gets the Attention?

Now we come to playing in the stadium—first off the complex at KSU will be a fully enclosed complex so fans buy tickets to see games at all the fields. Multiple fields make it possible to have a six-bracket competition. But everyone wants to play in the stadium, right? The big question, then, is, who gets to ply in the stadium.

This is what Tournament Director Dan Lyle told us:

The D1A Men's bracket and the D1 Elite/NIRA will see some pool games, a selection of quarterfinals, and then the semis, the bowl finals, and the cup finals all in the stadium.

The Men's D1 and Women's D1 Club will see some pool matches plus the bow finals and cup finals in the stadium.

The Men's Open and Women's D2 will see the cup finals in the stadium.

The TV coverage will have a similar breakdown. CNBC will be showing two hours of action on Saturday, and then CNBC and NBC will combine for four hours on Sunday. (Consider that bowl finals of the top two tiers plus cup finals of all six brackets takes up about 3 1/2 hours.)

Peacock will stream an additional two hours each day. So that's a total of 10 hours of coverage.

That's It For Now

At GRR we know that details matter to teams and players. The details we have listed above we hope give you some useful information. We'll continue to map out how this new tournament is coming together.