☀️West Coast Sevens Round One
September 26
Los Angeles, CA
Website

🏉Springboks vs All Blacks
September 12
Baltimore, MD

The Rugby Morning podcast was gracious to let this knucklehead on their podcast this week to talk about what Rugby Riot is, and the high school rugby landscape in general.
So if you wanna hear yours truly ramble and rant for about 25 minutes, check out the interview on YouTube (linked below) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

(I jump on around the 23min mark)

Framesports gave Rugby Riot a peek under the hood, sharing data from 100 anonymized matches their analysts have tagged event-by-event — including 33 U.S. high school-age matches.

And one thing jumped out to me: high school rugby really doesn't like kicking the ball.

In the high school games analyzed, teams kicked from hand just 7.2 times per game.

For comparison, that number steadily increased at every level in the dataset: 10.9 kicks for low-level amateur teams, 11.9 for high-level amateurs, 13.2 at the semi-professional level and 16.1 for professional teams.

In other words, the professional sides in this sample kicked more than twice as often as the high school teams.

High school players mostly kept the ball in hand.

High school sides averaged 91 passes per game, compared with 79 at the professional level.

There's an important caveat here: while all 33 high school games are from U.S. teams, I have no idea which teams were included. There are certainly outliers to this data. Plus, the full dataset includes rugby from outside the United States. So this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison of American high school and professional rugby.

Still, the difference in how the game is played at different levels is pretty fascinating.

The other big gap is tackling. (Not surprised at all by this.)

High school teams completed 68% of their tackle attempts, missing 26.9 tackles per game. Tackle completion climbed steadily as the level increased — 74% for high-level amateurs, 78% for semi-professionals and 80% for professionals.

Interestingly, plenty of other parts of the game weren't nearly as different. High school sides won 80% of their own lineouts (I’m shocked by this one) compared with 84% for professionals, for example, while knock-ons and penalties weren't dramatically higher.

It's only a 100-game sample, so we're not ready to rewrite the coaching manual.

But if you're looking for two things that seem to change as players climb the rugby ladder, this info might give us a pretty good place to start:

Make your tackles and get comfortable using the boot.

Thanks to Framesports.ai for sharing this info. Go check them out and get your games analyzed. It’s pretty dope.

ANTHONY RICCI | SacAir Alum
🎥 Playing for the Mexico U19 team at RAN, Ricci lays down a huge hit on a Jamaica ball-carrier.
BOOM!

Check out Anthony Ricci’s Rugby Riot Profile:

You guys have been adding some elite game-day rituals to your profiles. Here are a few of our favorites this week:

Fermin Duran | Hawaiian Gardens Rugby

This man fears nothing.

Nathan Rasmussen | MotherLode Rugby

Instantly thought of this…

Ricardo Madrigal | CenCal Rugby alum | Fresno State

Where is this salon and how do I book an appointment?

Oddball musings, thanks to the cold tub.

🏉 Is everyone else’s Instagram feed filled with clothing brands’ ads for their new rugby jersey-style shirts? I can’t tell if it’s a signal that the public wants more rugby apparel, or just the algorithm whacking me over the head repeatedly.

🏉 I’ll be at the All Blacks vs Springboks game in Baltimore next Saturday. If you’re there too, hit me up and maybe we can grab a post-match beverage 🍻

🏉 I have no idea how rugby was able to steal the nickname “footy” from soccer, but I’m glad we did. “Handsy” would have been unfortunate.