On Tuesday nights at a wrestling center in Midtown, close to 40 of the best women rugby players from around the world smash into each other over and over again for two hours in the name of contact practice. The team has been training for the last five weeks to be part of a new semiprofessional women’s rugby league in the United States, which debuts in New York City on Saturday.
For their inaugural game, the New York Exiles will face the Boston Banshees at 3 p.m., at the Stadium at Memorial Field in Mount Vernon. They’re part of Women’s Elite Rugby, which includes six teams from six cities.
Rugby is having a national moment thanks to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team’s splashy showing at the Paris Olympics. The bronze medal performance transformed player Ilona Maher into a social media star, with more than 8 million followers on TikTok and Instagram, and led to her appearance on “Dancing with the Stars” in November.
Maher isn’t in this league, however. She just wrapped up a historic season in England as a member of the Bristol Bears, with the highest attendance record in the history of Gallagher Premiership Rugby, one of the top English leagues.
But the Exiles have their share of the sport’s stars, including Tess Feury, who has competed for Team USA in two World Cups; Jenn Salomon-Clayton, who won a silver medal with Mexico at the Central American Games; and the Bronx’s Adriana Castillo, who has played for the Dominican Republic national team.
The Women’s Elite Rugby league launches as women’s sports is booming, and lands amid the creation of new leagues like Unrivaled, the 3×3 women’s basketball league chartered by Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier. There’s also the Professional Women’s Hockey League, which launched in 2023. The WNBA is adding three teams by 2026, including the Golden State Valkyries this season.
Previously, the top American women rugby players who wanted to compete at high levels had few options. Most opted to play in semiprofessional, pay-to-play leagues in the United States, meaning they had to fund their activity themselves. To qualify to play overseas, athletes needed to appear in competition on behalf of Team USA, making the pool for athletes who can play internationally very small.
“To look at options internationally is like uprooting your whole life,” Exiles player Misha Green-Yotts said on a video call from her classroom in New Rochelle, where she is a speech pathologist. “A pathway definitely needed to be established.”
Green-Yotts, like many of the country’s top women rugby players, can’t rely on rugby alone for her income. She’s one of the many competitors working a full-time job in order to support her dreams. She’s also a mother of two.
The Women’s Elite Rugby League is pulling a lot of its talent — including coaching staff, athletes and even referees – from the American semiprofessional pay-to-play leagues. New York Exiles head coach Diego Maquieira was previously the head coach of New York Rugby Club, where he first coached Green-Yotts and many of the other athletes who are still carving out time for rugby in their lives for little financial gain.
While the league has ambitions to eventually pay athletes enough so that they don’t have to work additional jobs, it can’t be sure when that will be. Women’s Elite Rugby is expensing everything needed for the athletes to play and payments are distributed within a prize winnings structure, meaning that some games will award cash prizes to the winners.
In England, players face similar struggles with juggling rugby and working because the contracts for competing for the country only earn them around $35,000, according to an interview with English rugby star Ellie Kildunne. They receive pay for appearances and wins on top of that.
That is to be expected for the first few years of the league, according to Wendy Young, rugby expert and editor of Your Scrum Connection.
”The goal is to make sure that it’s a living wage, so they can play the sport, grow programs and look better on the international stage,” Young said in a video interview.
Players in the league say they are hopeful the wages will increase as the sport gains traction here.
“I knew what I was getting into and it’s part of the journey,” Exiles player Jenn Salomon-Clayton said on a video call. Salomon-Clayton is used to being a pioneer in the world of rugby: She was a player on Quinnipiac’s first NCAA Division 1 team and joined the Mexican national team in 2019 to support it as an emerging rugby country.
“Hopefully there will be that time down the road where people can make a living wage for play, which would be amazing.”
Historically, women’s sports leagues have struggled to generate enough profit in their first few years to pay their athletes competitive salaries. In 1997, the minimum WNBA salary was just $15,000, and players have only recently been able to negotiate contracts for higher salaries and long-term benefits across the board.
Another challenge for the Women’s Elite Rugby league will be finding its footing with an American audience. Though rugby is incredibly popular abroad (it is the national sport in Georgia, Fiji and New Zealand, for example), it is not a widespread collegial sport in the United States, and many Americans are not as familiar with the game as they are, say, with basketball or football.
Still, backers of the league — which include Chasing Rainbows, a venture capital firm that supports LGBTQ+ business ventures, and private investor Deborah Henretta, who discovered the sport in college — say it’s a good bet.
Rugby participation has surged in the last few years, a trend driven largely by women. Reuters reported that thousands of women joined rugby clubs following the success of team USA at the Paris Olympics.
On the popular podcast U.S. Rugby Happy Hour LIVE, Young interviewed Women’s Elite Rugby co-founder and league President Jessica Hammond-Graf about the league’s strategy to break through to home audiences. The league is partnering with DAZN, a global sports streaming service, to broadcast all 30 games in the inaugural season.
Hammond-Graf said the decision to make games free to watch is an attempt to attract viewers beyond current rugby fans and make games accessible for fans who live outside of the six markets with teams.
“[We] recognized the opportunity for change and decided to capitalize on the women’s sports trajectory,” Hammond-Graf said in a conversation for Sports Industry Group, a UK-based group focused on sports industry professionals. “Our motivation was to create an entertaining rugby product for Americans. We knew we were setting an aggressive timeline, but recognized this opportunity and went all in.”
The Exiles are named after the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” a sonnet written in 1883 to raise money for the construction of the Statue of Liberty, comparing the copper monument to the “Mother of Exiles.”
It bears a message of resilience in the face of adversity that feels close to the journey for the league.
“When you think of New York, you think of grit, diversity, resilience, determination,” Salomon-Clayton said. “It really touched us when we first heard it. We’re going to be that sense of community for ourselves and others.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
