US plans for rugby sevens pro league include 'Gauntlet' tiebreakers

Plans were announced on Monday for an ambitious professional sevens competition featuring 48-minute matches, kicking off in the US next year.

The Super 7s format was trialled in Philadelphia in 2014 with a game between teams from New York and Canada, as reported by the Guardian at the time. The concept announced on Monday, designed to broaden the appeal of sevens rugby union to US TV audiences away from the traditional one- or two-day tournament model, involves interchangeable squads of 16 to 21 players playing four 12-minute quarters.

Organisers said there will be three-minute breaks between quarters, a six-minute halftime and, in a distinctly American twist, no ties. Any game level at the end of regular play will be decided by “a tie-breaking two-on-one skills competition” known as “The Gauntlet”.

According to a statement from United World Sports, the New York company that runs the USA Sevens in Las Vegas, the seven-a-side Collegiate Rugby Championships and the 15-a-side Varsity Cup, Super 7s will “launch with a barnstorming six city ‘Pro Tour’ across the United States next July following the 2018 Rugby Sevens World Cup in San Francisco”, prior to league play beginning with city-based teams in 2019.

Players for six men’s teams and six women’s teams will be taken “largely from college and club programmes already in the US and Canada”, UWS said, prior to “an historic inaugural Super 7s League draft”.

The “Pro Tour”, the company added, will act as a “roadshow that showcases the sport of Super 7s to build the profile of the game, engage strategic partners, and identify key markets as the league evolves into a full city by city league in the spring and summer of 2019”.

David Niu, an Australian-born USA international who played professional rugby league for St George in Australia and Bradford Bulls in the UK, has been named president of Super 7s, having recently returned from working on the expansion of Arena Football in China.

“I am very enthused about the launch of Super 7s in North America,” he said. “It certainly fits the American psyche for fast, exciting, yet short content … we are ready to take a sport that will appeal to a wide audience with a very short learning curve to new levels of engagement.”

Super 7s is not the first attempt to establish domestic professional rugby union in the US. PRO Rugby, a five-team 15-a-side league, completed its debut season in 2016 but has not returned this year. Founder Doug Schoninger told the Guardian recently he was hopefully a month or so away from announcing our plans for PRO 2.0”, having “learned a lot in our beta inaugural year”.

Foreign leagues are also looking to establish a foothold. This month, the English Aviva Premiership announced a game in Philadelphia in September. Reports continue to link the Scottish-Irish-Welsh-Italian Pro12 to an expansion franchise in the US, potentially in Houston.

Sevens rugby union made its Olympic debut in Brazil last year, the USA men’s team finishing ninth and the women fifth. The Eagles men finished fifth on this year’s HSBC World Series table; the women are sixth with one event to go.

The CRC, the annual showpiece of the increasingly strong US college game from which Super 7s will seek to draw much of its playing talent, takes place at the Talen Energy Stadium in Philadelphia this weekend.