page_title: Division 1-A Rugby
section_title: History of college rugby in the U.S.
hierarchical_section_title: Division 1-A Rugby / Formation / History of college rugby in the U.S.
caption_attribution_description: English: The United States national rugby union team at 1920 Summer Olympics.Français&#160;: L'équipe des États-Unis de rugby à XV aux Jeux olympiques d'été de 1920.
context_page_description: Division 1-A Rugby is the highest level of college rugby within the United States and is administered by USA Rugby. Division 1-A rugby is modeled after NCAA athletic competitions, with the 67 D1-A rugby schools divided into eight conferences: East, Mid-South, Rocky Mountain, California, Big Ten, Liberty, Red River, and PAC.
  The regular season sees all teams in the conference play one another, with the two top seeds qualifying for the playoffs. Playoffs are a single-elimination format, occurring each year in April and May, with the winner of D1-A declared the National Champion. Regular seasons for most conferences are played in the spring, although some cold-weather conferences, such as the Big Ten Universities, play their regular season in the fall.
  The competition's first season was played during 2011 and consisted of teams from 31 schools from across the United States. The first ever match of the competition was played on Friday March 4, the Arizona State Sun Devils hosted the Colorado Buffaloes at the Arizona State University Soccer Stadium in Tempe, Arizona. The 2011 final was played at Rio Tinto Stadium, in Sandy, Utah, on the 21 May 2011.
context_section_description: A group of British Army officers organized a game of rugby against the students of McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) in 1865; the Canadians were so enamored of the game that they decided to continue to play football by the Rugby code.  In 1874 McGill organized two games of football against Harvard, one was played under Harvard's rules, the other being a game of rugby.  After this game, the Harvard students also decided to adopt rugby, making them the first American institution to do so. Columbia, Princeton and Yale were persuaded by Harvard to play football according to the Rugby School code in 1876, these four colleges thus formed the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA), an organization that eventually expanded to become the "Ivy League."  In fact, the governing body of all American intercollegiate varsity sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) traces its roots to the IFA and is thus a product of rugby rather than any of the sports it now governs.
  By 1886 the Yale coach Walter Camp had modified rugby's rules in order to solve the problem of tackled players lying on the ball by introducing a series of four downs to gain ten yards; ironically in the same year the Rugby Football Union in England solved the same problem by requiring that tackled players release the ball.  This is still one of the most fundamental differences between Rugby Union and American Football but one further modification, that of allowing one forward pass per down, was suggested by the Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne which, when accepted in 1905, gave rise to that distinctly American form of football.
  Around the turn of the century American football was being frowned upon for its violence.  Publication of graphic photographs of a harsh game between Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania caused a stir; President Theodore Roosevelt was forced to insist upon reform or abolition of the game.  During this period of uncertainty, rugby made a brief but important reappearance in many colleges, most notably at the University of California and at Stanford.  It was Stanford that supplied most of the players to the two US Olympic rugby teams, along with Santa Clara University and the University of California. (1920 & 1924) who claimed fame by winning both Gold medals (as 1924 was the last time the Olympic Games staged a rugby competition, this will make the USA the defending Olympic Champions when rugby is re-introduced, after almost a century in 2016).
  In 1934, there was only one official rugby body in the United States, the Eastern Rugby Union, with a total of 9 member teams.  By 1950, there were 30 clubs in the US, existing only in small pockets on the East and West Coasts.
  It was not until the mid-1960s that rugby began to re-appear with regular fixtures and competitions; the game suited the mildly anarchistic temperament of American College students of the period; it required minimal costs for the individual, the style of the game provided constant action, there was an emphasis on enjoyment rather than winning because rugby was not part of the now rigidly institutionalized athletic system that American Universities had developed.  The formation of the United States of America Rugby Football Union (USARFU, now USA Rugby) in 1976 was a major organizational milestone for the sport in the US, and by 1980 there were over 1,000 clubs nationwide.
  In 2011, there were 2433 clubs in the United States with more than 88,000 registered players, approximately 40% of which are college players (about three-quarters being male and one quarter female).
caption: 1920 USA Olympic Rugby Team.
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