Dr Jessica Hammond-Graf is president and chief sporting officer of Women’s Elite Rugby, the US semi-professional rugby union competition that kicks off its second season on Saturday in Massachusetts and Illinois. Like most Americans, she did not grow up with the game.
An Army kid, she spent a lot of time playing soccer. In the early 90s, at the University of Connecticut, she tried out for the round ball and then played Ultimate Frisbee. Then, one fateful day, a woman on her floor said, “Hey, you should come try rugby, OK?” Hammond-Graf agreed, then found herself starting her very first game at fly-half, responsible for directing a team.
“Someone was running by me and was like, ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t even know where I’m supposed to be. So like, let’s just figure this out, right?’”
In America, it was ever thus. Deep-end introductions can be challenging, bordering on terrifying, but can also prove extremely potent, seeding love of the game for life. Times change, players find the game younger and WER is altogether more professional in approach than 90s college rugby ever could have been. But having launched from the foundation of the amateur Women’s Premier League, and operating amid all the disadvantages that afflict women’s sports, the new league must still scrap for each yard gained.
Hammond-Graf’s own rugby career shadowed her professional career in the halls of higher education: coaching at Temple University in Philadelphia; game time in Louisiana for the New Orleans Half-Moons, while at Tulane; regional rugby, representing the West; US Eagles sevens selection, leading to memorable experiences in New Zealand and Fiji; playing back home for the DC Furies and NOVA, in Virginia; coaching with the US Naval Academy and Chesapeake women. But by the time WER came into view, in 2022, around the awarding of a US-hosted women’s World Cup in 2033, she’d actually stepped away.
“My professional background was in college athletics,” Hammond-Graf said. Rugby “was this thing that I was passionate about, but I didn’t have an active role in rugby at the time. Then in the fall of 2022, after the WPL season, the league leadership and the players came together, and they recognized that there was an opportunity for change, and they wanted to elevate rugby. And so myself and a group of other women were seated as the first external board. So really it was about taking that and running with that, and then launching WER, and I felt that my background in college athletics could help guide and shape the direction of the league, how we were going to go about our business.”
The mission, Hammond-Graf said, was simply “to elevate our game. We needed to evolve from the grassroots. The leadership at the time was great, but it’s really hard to be a player-led organization. We really wanted to elevate that for the players and for rugby in general, and really change the landscape of women’s rugby in the US.
“We know that there’s going to be a lot of eyes on rugby as early as 2028 with the Olympics [in Los Angeles] and the subsequent World Cups [the men’s event being hosted in 2031]. And so this was the opportunity to bring people along, to help build a fanbase, to create that pathway. Really to think of it in the business lens, that commercial lens. How do we take it from the grassroots to a professional environment?”
Season one kicked off last March. In California, Colorado, Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, Boston and New York, six teams got down to business, the result an inaugural championship for the Denver Onyx, a host of lessons learned.
“It’s certainly not easy,” Hammond-Graf said. “There’s a lot of late hours to really be able to put things in motion. For example, I think next year, or when we consider our expansion teams, we will have the venues before we announce the locations.
“Securing venues has probably been the hardest thing we’ve had to do, and right-sizing the venues too. We talk about elevating. You don’t want to just play on the parks and rec fields any more. We’ve all done that, and we’re now women playing in stadiums. But we don’t need 20,000-seat stadiums to capture an audience. So finding the right venues has probably been the hardest thing. We’ve pivoted this year to two new venues. The Bay Breakers are opening up at Heart Health Park in Sacramento, which we know is a great rugby pitch. The US just played there [against New Zealand]. And we’ve also pivoted in Chicago to Benedictine University, which grants access to a higher-level training environment.”
Season two brings new investors, including Grammy-winning singer Meghan Trainor, announced with appropriate fanfare this week. It also brings new challenges, including controversy over a change to USA Rugby rules regarding trans players in women’s rugby, dictated by the sport’s Olympic status and federal government pressure and with which WER has said it “does not agree”, adding that it will “actively work to ensure inclusion both on and off the pitch”.
Back on the field, the US Eagles squad for the recent Pacific Four series, including that game against the Black Ferns, contained five players from WER. Many top American players earn a living in England, in Premiership Women’s Rugby, but WER players thrive elsewhere, including on the world sevens circuit. Hammond-Graf points to such exploits from Tahna Wilfley, daughter of the former US Eagles fly-half Link Wilfley and a WER standout with Denver last year. The Eagles also deploy a number of players still in full-time college, a talent pool of which WER leaders are certainly aware.
Hammond-Graf works with WER’s director of rugby, the great Eagles prop Jamie Burke, to “make sure that we are casting a wide net, especially during the declaration period that happened last fall. One of the things that was important to us is to eliminate barriers to try out for WER. So that’s why right now we don’t have combines. We know there’s a lot of people that have a lot of rugby skills that can relocate and so we’re casting that wide net to bring people along and give them an opportunity to participate. Our coaches this past year went on a couple scouting trips to look at talent in the college ranks.”
There is continuity in coaching, five of the six teams starting season two with the coaches who started season one. In Chicago, Kristin Zdanczewicz took charge part way through that run.
Chicago were notable stragglers then, winless in 10 games while Denver won nine of 10 before smashing New York Exiles 53-13 to win the Legacy Cup. Hammond-Graf would like to see greater parity, in part because “we know fans will stick around for exciting matches. Coaches want the big swings, right? It gives them a little bit of breathing room. But with tight games, people stay involved. We’ve all seen those Super Bowls that are blowouts. We just end up turning them off. So we want to make sure that we have the player base to come along with us as we look to expand.”
That’s the plan: more teams, employing more women, particularly in areas “that we just haven’t tapped into. I joke that now, everything’s above the Mason-Dixon line. There’s a lot of rugby that’s happening in DC, down in North Carolina, in San Diego and the LA area. So there’s really still hotbeds for us to tap into, and there’s a lot of talent that for whatever reason can’t play in WER right now. So we know that there’ll be some good movement coming.”
USA Rugby and World Rugby will hope that is the case, as the World Cup approaches and as the Eagles seek to build on promise shown this month in victory over Australia and, in places, in defeats by Canada and New Zealand.
Hammond-Graf recently attended Senior Day at Dartmouth, in New Hampshire, long a women’s college power.
“When they were announcing, ‘So-and-so is graduating and her plans are blah, blah, blah,’ somebody said their plan was to play professional rugby. It just made my heart swell – whether it’s in the US or whether it’s overseas, that desire, that recognition that this is possible now. This is something young players can see as a pathway forward.”