The first recorded match between two colleges in game played in United States using rugby union code rules occurred on May 14, 1874 between Harvard University and McGill University. Predating rugby using the rugby union rules were forms of football "carrying games" with use of hands permitted (as opposed to "kicking games" where hands were not permitted) including a game between Harvard College Freshmen and Sophomores at a game played at Harvard campus in 1858. The "carrying game" emerged apparently due to the popularity of the 1857 published Tom Brown's School Days as reported in Evolvements of Early American Foot Ball: Through the 1899/91 Season by Melvin I. Smith (Library of Congress Control Number 2008903251 first published December 2, 2008) pages xii and xiii Harvard varsity interscholastic rugby team was not founded until December 6, 1872 Evolvements of Early American Foot Ball: Through the 1899/91 Season page xiii/
In addition to Harvard rugby, Columbia Rugby, and Princeton Rugby, University of Pennsylvania and Yale College first fielded rugby teams in mid 1870s essentially playing by the rugby union code rules (relative to American football rules, as such American football rules had not yet been invented). An example of Penn's earliest games was a game against College of New Jersey (which in 1895 changed its name to Princeton) played in Philadelphia on Saturday, November 11, 1876, which was less than two weeks before Princeton met on November 23, 1876 with Harvard and Columbia to confirm that all their games would be played using the rugby union rules.Rottenberg, Dan (1985) "Fight On, Pennsylvania" Trustees of University of Pennsylvania pg. 25, 28, 33, 34. Princeton and Penn played their November 1876 game per a combination of rugby (there were 20 players per side and players were able to touch the ball with their hands) and association football codes. The rugby union code influence was due, in part, to the fact that some of their students had been educated in English public schoolsBath (1977) p77 and by 1869 Princeton was playing with rules substantially identical to rugby.
Among the prominent college players to play in a 19th century version of rugby (rules that did not allow forward passes or center snaps) was John Heisman, namesake of the Heisman Trophy and an 1892 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Walter Camp of Yale. Heisman and Camp were instrumental in the first decade of the 20th century in changing the rules to more closely relate to present rules of American football.From the point in time of the 1882 change to introduce the five-yard-in-three-downs rule, the game in the USA was no longer rugby union.
Football clubs adopting rugby union laws existed at least since the 1880s in San Francisco, and grew in the early 1900s, spurred in part by American football's crisis of 1905–06 due to the perception that American football was a violent sport. During this era, rugby union was perceived as having the potential to challenge American football as the dominant football code on the west coast. For example, from 1906 to 1912 University of Pennsylvania (aka Penn) team played per rugby union code rules even after Penn started playing American gridiron football. Evidence of such may be found in an October 22, 1910, Daily Pennsylvanian article (quoted below) and a yearbook photo that rugby per rugby union code was played.
Led by Cal and Stanford, a number of universities of the West Coast took a different path and did not play rugby union alongside American football BUT instead eliminated America football and changed their game to Rugby union. Other schools that made the switch included Nevada, St. Mary's, Santa Clara, and USC (in 1911).In 1910 a combined American Universities team visited Australia and New Zealand. Visits were made to play teams on the West Coast by the Australian (Wallabies) on their 1909 tour and 1912 tour, and New Zealand (All Blacks) in 1906 tour and 1913 tour.
At the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, a United States rugby team (composed largely of players from the University of California and Stanford University) defeated France to win the gold medal. Rugby union was again included in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, where the United States defeated France for the gold. The player-coach of the United States Olympic gold-winning rugby team at the 1924 Summer Olympics was Alan Valentine, who played rugby for Swarthmore College and also played while at Penn (as he was getting a Master's degree at Wharton School of Finance of University of Pennsylvania).
Despite this success, however, rugby in the United States was surpassed by American gridiron football but Dartmouth, Penn, and Yale on East Coast played intermittently from the 30s through the 50s and University of California never stopped playing from the last decade of the 19th century through to the present.
Princeton and Harvard teams played using rugby union code continuously since the early 1930s (as detailed below). The present Princeton Rugby team was reorganized in 1931 under the leadership of Monte Barak, Hugh Sloan, H.F. Langenberg, and coach John Boardman Whitton and has been playing continuously ever since. Similarly Harvard Rugby has continuously played since the early 1930s. Indeed, over 5,000 people attended the inaugural Harvard - Princeton game in 1931.
Yale Rugby teams played using rugby union rules continuously since the late 1940s and Dartmouth Rugby teams continuously played per rugby union rules since it was reorganized in 1951.
Rugby union in the United States revival beyond University of California and Stanford University on West Coast and certain Universities (which became part of the Ivy League in the mid-1950s) accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, as many other colleges and universities started club rugby teams."The Beginning of 7s in the US" , Rugby Today, August 11, 2014. Among the first was the University of Vermont Rugby Football Club, founded by Professor David Scrase. USA Rugby, the body that governs rugby in the U.S., was founded in 1975. On 31 January 1976, the U.S. national team played Australia—in its first official match since the 1924 Olympics—before 7,000 fans at Glover Field in Los Angeles. The United States national team participated in the inaugural 1987 Rugby World Cup. Rugby in the U.S. received a significant boost in 2009 when the International Olympic Committee voted to reinstate rugby into the Summer Olympics beginning in 2016.
Professional competition of rugby union began in 2016, PRO Rugby, and the currently-sanctioned top-level professional league, Major League Rugby (MLR), began play in 2018. Major League Rugby implemented its first collegiate MLR Draft in 2020. Players are eligible for draft after 3 years in college at 21 years old. Free agents can try to join teams at 18 years old.
College rugby is the fastest-growing college sport in the US. Rugby union is also the fastest growing-sport in the US.
Early football variants
Early European settlers in North America brought forms of medieval and traditional football with them. However, we know that in 1610, William Strachey, an English colonist at Jamestown, Virginia recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman, so it is clear that they had their own codes as well. Early games appear to have had much in common with the traditional "mob football" played in England. The games remained largely unorganized until the 19th century, when intramural games of football began to be played on college campuses. Each school played its own variety of football.
Princeton students played a game called "ballown" as early as 1820. A Harvard tradition known as "Bloody Monday" began in 1827, which consisted of a mass ballgame between the freshman and sophomore classes. Dartmouth played its own version called "Old division football", the rules of which were first published in 1871, though the game dates to at least the 1830s. All of these games, and others, shared certain commonalities. They remained largely "mob" style games, with huge numbers of players attempting to advance the ball into a goal area, often by any means necessary. Rules were simple and violence and injury were common. The violence of these mob-style games led to widespread protests and a decision to abandon them. Yale, under pressure from the city of New Haven, banned the play of all forms of football in 1860, while Harvard followed suit in 1861.
Early U.S. rugby history: 1800s The sport of rugby union in the United States has always had a close relationship with the sport of American football. Initially, games of rugby, soccer, and hybrid games had been played between American universities. Primitive forms of rugby, then all covered by the name "football", were being played in the US as far back as the 1840s, at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, stemming partly from Americans who had been educated in English schools.Bath, p.77 However, in 1862, Yale dealt it a major blow by banning it for being too violent and dangerous, about seven years later, in 1869, the first game of rugby football was played between Princeton and Rutgers. the rules of the Princeton–Rutgers game were a form of rugby that predates the adoption of rugby union code and did not allow forward passing. However, rugby union was taking a firm grip of a number of elite private academic schools (that would form the Ivy League in the mid 1950s), University of California and other East Coast and West Coast Universities, where it would have an influence on the nascent gridiron, which later became its major competitor. American football's growth came at exactly the point at which rugby was beginning to establish itself in the States. Rugby spread through America's colleges, away from the Ivy League and the East Coast, into Texas, California and other west coast states. However, because of America's huge size, this resulted in a bipolar game, played mainly in east and west, but not really in the middle – other than Illinois and the Great Lakes, and Texas in the south. There would also come to be a small rugby-playing centre in Salt Lake City, as Polynesian Mormons came to study and live there, and to a lesser extent by returning missionaries.
In 1872, rugby clubs were established in the San Francisco Bay Area, composed mainly of British expatriates.
In 1875, Harvard athlete Nathaniel Curtis challenged Yale's captain, William Arnold to a rugby-style game. The two teams agreed to play under a set of rules called the "Concessionary Rules", which involved Harvard conceding something to Yale's soccer and Yale conceding a great deal to Harvard's rugby. The game featured a round ball instead of a rugby-style oblong ball, and caused Yale to drop association football in favor of rugby.THE BOSTON GAME article by Michael T. Geary at academia.edu
In 1876, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association, a competition based on the traditional rules of rugby union. Around the same time, the aforementioned British rugby players of San Francisco introduced rugby to the University of California, Berkeley.
A persistent problem within rugby football would be the question of amateurism vs professionalism. American football would take the professional route, something much frowned upon by the leadership of the rugby fraternity at the time. This was leading to crises in the Old World too, where in 1895, the Northern Rugby Football Union (a rugby league body) split away in England. While rugby league failed to gain much headway in North America, the financial draw of professional American football proved too strong for some American rugby players. Rugby union would not become professional officially until the 1995.
Rugby and American football