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My take on it is this – we need someone who’s quite the opposite of the last guy. Someone who can motivate the national team, a guy who knows his stuff, somebody with some cache, and a coach that can become the face of American rugby. In a nutshell, a person that mainstream sports fans in this country can get.
We need a guy who can go on ESPN and create a buzz; even just a small one. The bottom line is that it’s all about being able to do a bang up sales job, and as we live in the country that developed commercialism as we know it, that shouldn't be a stretch. American society is commercialism at its best, or its worst depending on your take on it, but either way it’s what people here get. And yes, it most definitely applies to sport.
Not convinced? Then how do you figure, for example, that college football works? When a college searches for a new head coach it seeks a guy who can go in front of TV cameras and not be an embarrassment, a guy who looks good and is articulate, and somebody who gets it done on the field.
Pete Carroll (USC), Urban Meyer (Florida), Nick Saban (Alabama), and Les Miles (LSU) are a few examples of what college athletics directors salivate over. Conversely, someone like Mark Mangino (Kansas) probably isn’t going to be offered the Michigan job because he doesn’t fit the mold.
Here’s the point. The successful candidate for the US head coaching gig needs to fit that kind of mold. He needs to be able to sell rugby football to the American sporting public. No disrespect to Peter Thorburn, but fortunately for us he wasn’t put in front of ESPN or Fox Sports because that would have been an absolute bust. Media stuff just wasn’t his shtick.
On the other hand, there’s no reason why Nigel Melville shouldn’t pop up on SportsCenter now and then. He looks okay, is media savvy and can speak well, albeit with a funny twang. Makes one wonder why Boulder isn’t out there promoting him to the mainstream media? It’s not as if it would cost anything to get some news coverage here and there if you have something interesting to say, and right now there's a lot of meaty stuff to talk about.
And please, don’t blah blah to the media about how wonderful it is that youth rugby is growing in Mississippi, or that some club somewhere just got a new sponsor, or that such and such a place is hosting an event. Here’s a newsflash, while rugby news and information websites such as ARN and others will often find room for that kind of info, it’s a big yawn for the mainstream guys and you can forget about getting a soundbyte from it because there’s nothing cool about it. We need to think big picture.
Wait a minute, wasn’t that one of the things that USA Rugby board chairman Kevin Roberts was going to sell to corporate America? Twelve months down the track we’ve seen didley squat in that regard.
Ask yourself this, when was the last time you saw a 15 second clip on ESPN News of a try being scored, a big hit, or a sensational tackle? Way too long, if ever, is the answer, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Soccer gets on TV. ESPN and Fox Sports talk about the round ball game from time to time, heck, MLS games are televised all over the place.
That happened because the soccer crowd realized it wasn’t serving them any useful purpose being a bunch of navel gazers, but apparently that’s what a large proportion of the US rugby community hasn’t figured out yet. There are still lots of people who are more concerned about guarding their patches than they are about getting with the program.
For far too long the rugby community has adopted an insular approach. It has been preaching to the converted while neglecting the bigger picture, which is to spread the word to the wider community. Hopefully the folks in Boulder who are going through the applications and presumably coming up with a shortlist of candidates get that and will make a start by hiring the right guy.