When Sean Duffy first joined the University of Arizona men’s rugby staff, the head coach noted a pre-existing tension with the women’s team. The teams operated independently of each other and didn’t really interact, until the university itself suggested a partnership that would be mutually beneficial to both teams and the school. Duffy is now a year into the Director of Rugby role and looking forward to the potential of a united rugby program as well as the support the teams will provide each other in the Covid-19 era.
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Duffy has been head coach of the Arizona men for six years, and up until last summer, the club funded his full-time position. He was not employed by the university, and in June 2019, UofA Campus Recreation contacted Duffy with some changes in mind.
“I was scared that I was done, that maybe they wanted to go in a different direction, like shifting toward student coaching or something,” Duffy said. “It’s the rugby in me. I’m always terrified [of the impermanence] of the rugby sphere.”
Duffy was pleasantly surprised then that Campus Rec wanted to hire him as the full-time Director of Rugby for the men’s and women’s teams. It’s a model that contrasts with other club sports and their relationships with the school.
“The suggestion came completely from the university, which is the best part,” Duffy referenced the value Arizona sees in the rugby teams. “When I got promoted, people thought I had been lobbying for this for years, but it was quite the opposite.”
So why did the university want to amplify its support of the rugby teams? Duffy first pointed to numbers. There are upward of 100 athletes between the two rosters, where most clubs on campus have 30-40 players, per Duffy.
“We kind of already knew this but didn’t quantify it until the last few weeks,” Duffy introduced the impact of rugby’s numbers. “Men’s rugby has been able to recruit very well and contribute $2-2.5 million in tuition. Eighty-eight students are non-residents [of Arizona] and 24% are international. Those numbers are substantially higher than what the university sees from the student body or other clubs.”
And those numbers have the potential to multiply once the Director of Rugby starts implementing those and different recruiting strategies with the women’s team.
“I no longer subscribe to rugby being the fastest-growing sport in the country – that’s an old concept,” Duffy continued. “But you can see the USA men on TV and the [USA] women playing well. The university sees the commercial side of it, and that there are a lot more student opportunities with the sport.”
The relevant parties agreed to the new partnership, but Duffy had to do some relationship work with the women’s team before he started making inroads.
“It’s Rusty’s show,” Duffy deferred to women’s head coach Rusty Wortman, who was named 2019-20 Arizona Club Sports Coach of the Year. “He’s done a phenomenal job with the women, and I told him, ‘I’m here for what you need, and anything and everything in between.’ I spent the first few months just listening. I wasn’t going to come in and make wholesale changes.
“The biggest obstacle was getting the women’s team to believe me, that I wasn’t trying to turn them into the Black Ferns,” Duffy said. “I don’t blame them. They knew me as the men’s head coach, and we were playing teams like Cal, and we just didn’t interact much. I told the team that I had two goals: The first was to make sure they knew we weren’t trying to replicate what I’ve done with the men. Some schools have an elite, high performance model, and that’s great. Some schools are just a club, and if they’re good one year, then that’s great, too. ‘Team’ can be different things to different people. We’ll have girls who want to be Eagles like [Arizona alumna] Amy Naber [Bonte] and others who just want to be a part of something. Some have never played a sport before, and we owe it to them to give them a good experience regardless of their athletic background.”
Duffy followed Wortman’s lead at training sessions and started building trust through “little-voice coaching,” or one-on-one feedback that happens outside of the group or during team drills.
“Both social and elite players welcome little-voice coaching; it transcends their aspirations,” Duffy said. “Not everyone responds to big-voice coaching, and the men are the same.”
The Wildcats were 3-9 across the 2018 and 2019 seasons, and heading into spring 2020, the women set the goal of winning one game. Ideally, the Tucson squad would beat Grand Canyon University and Arizona State for in-state bragging rights, but the team wasn’t talking playoffs.
But then the victories started coming – UCLA, UC San Diego, Grand Canyon and UC Santa Barbara – before a shutout loss to BYU, the reigning DI spring champion.
“The women made a big jump from where they thought they’d be, and to see the look on their faces – there was one game in particular,” Duffy said. “It was at home and I was watching it with the Campus Rec director. Last year we lost to that team by a lot, 30-40 points, and this year it was tied at half. Rusty made some great decisions and won by 30-35 points. Everyone was so pumped and excited to see the growth. The staff and coaches see that growth but the players need something to point to, whether it’s a specific game or a record.”
Duffy was gutted for the team when Covid-19 ended what was shaping up to be a good season, but with no seniors on the 2020 squad, a lot of experience and continuity will return this year. The positive record also helps Duffy when building the women’s recruitment channels, modeled after the men and extending internationally.
“The school is important, the message is important, but people need to see [the product] on the field. No one will come here if you’re losing every game,” Duffy said. “The whole first year I didn’t recruit much. I didn’t want to go shopping without knowing what we have. Now that I’ve done that and consulted coaches on who’s graduating and who we need, the past two months have ramped up and we’ve made some moves. … But it’s not just about boosting enrollment. The men’s side has a larger player pool to choose from but we’ve done well in picking the right players.”
The women’s team wants to get to a place where it has a legitimate, sustainable second side.
“The biggest thing for us is that we need to get our competitive structures in place,” Duffy said. “There have been a lot of changes with [National Collegiate Rugby] and [Collegiate Rugby Association of America], and we need a structure that is marketable. We want to get games on campus. We did that on the men’s side and had success really advertising that and selling tickets, and we’ll start doing that with the women.
“One issue we have, which ties into the first, is if we had 60 players tomorrow, who would they play,” the coach posed. “Lots of schools have just one team. I’m confident we can build a second side but can we produce a worthwhile schedule that’s worthwhile for the second side? That’ll take two years, but the players want it.”
Having the current players back the recruitment initiative is key and aligns with Duffy’s promise that he’d help build a program that the women want.
“My second goal was to break down the wall between the teams,” Duffy circled back to the trust-building conversations with the women’s team. “It predates my time at Arizona, but it was there. Not the healthiest relationship between the teams. You see it across the country, and it never made sense to me. It’s literally the same sport. Women are coming in and they’re athletic and ferocious and tough, just like the men’s team.”
Duffy is culturing a single-club concept and starting with the underclassmen, who will be the team leaders when the program starts operating as desired. He makes an effort to group freshmen and sophomores together on busses or with tutors, and will build on those opportunities to bond this year. If Covid-19 limits training to skill sessions, Duffy envisions both teams training together, from scrumhalves working on their passes, to kickers sharing the pitch at the same time. The goal is to get to a place where everyone views each other as athletes playing the same sport.
“We played Grand Canyon on a Friday night doubleheader,” Duffy said of the early February matches. “The men played first, the women watched and had a tunnel ready for them to cheer them off. Rather than leave – like we might have done in previous years – the men stayed to watch the women and went nuts. It was so cool. After the women’s game, and I didn’t say anything to them, the captain said, ‘Alright, let’s go.’ And I was thinking they were heading to the bus, but no, they made their way to the field and made a tunnel for the women. It was a cool moment.”