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Landmark first USA Rugby contracts awarded ahead of RWC 2025
By Joe Harvey
At this year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup, the USA Women’s Eagles players can call themselves professional for the first time.
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Between April and the end of September, 38 players have been contracted to USA Rugby in the aim of helping World Rugby’s ninth-ranked side compete with the best in the world.
Sione Fukofuka’s side now joins England’s Red Roses, New Zealand’s Black Ferns, France, Ireland, Wales, Italy and Scotland, in supporting their players financially, as well as the likes of Spain on short-term grants for the showpiece tournament.
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It is a landmark moment for the side, who are grouped with the Red Roses at the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup and finished as the lowest-ranked side in WXV 1 last year.
More than anything else, there is a sense of relief for a squad that has consistently had to balance careers with competing at the very top of the game.
“Having the contracts in place for the six months leading into the World Cup just creates a sense of stability,” Kate Zackary, Women’s Eagles captain, told RugbyPass.
“Obviously, it is such an important part of the year, you want players not having to be distracted or worried about when their next paycheque comes.
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“Traditionally, we’ve always had players who work full-time. Even leading into the last World Cup, I worked until around six months prior, and then I left work so I could just focus on the World Cup. It is a massive step forward for these months.”
USA Rugby’s High Performance Director, Tamara Sheppard, informed RugbyPass that after the team’s sixth-place finish at WXV 1, it was ‘always in our plans to implement a contract system to enable the players to make the required commitment to the programme’.
To do just that, Sheppard met with Zackary and other representatives from the USA Rugby Players Association after establishing the concept for how the contracts would work.
Now there are three tiers of contracts available for players and accounts for 25 per cent of the women’s 15s budget for 2025.
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“If we want to be a top 10 team and we want to stay consistent, you need a bit more financial support,” Zackary said.
“This Fall, it started to become a bit more of a reality, and we negotiated a few things here and there with the union, led by Tamara Sheppard.
“What’s great, they came to us with a plan. They knew it was always on our docket.
“Then they said, we’ve got the opportunity to do this and then we just went through some of the terms, the tiering, and it was great because the union were proactive with coming up with the finer details.
“Once we were able to announce it to the players, we were excited about it and everyone was excited to know there was six months of security leading into the World Cup, they weren’t going to have to worry at all. They could focus (on rugby).
“Versus the last World Cup, some of us found ourselves in a stable state where we could leave work, but not everyone can. It just creates a bit less stress for those players.”
In the past, USA Rugby had paid players only during their time in camp.
As a result, players have either halted their full-time work outside of rugby or just had to bide their time before rejoining the international set-up.
Now, after the Eagles conclude their Pacific Four Series campaign in a fortnight, athletes will be paid for the month of June before they get ready to host Fiji in Washington DC in July.
For some of the players, such as Zackary, Alev Kelter and Rachel Johnson, who have played in Premiership Women’s Rugby, they have become accustomed to being paid for their services, while domestic-based players have only just started getting paid in the newly established Women’s Elite Rugby league.
Already six weeks into getting paid to represent their country, there is already a sense of excitement amongst the group.
“Everyone has been excited,” Zackary said. “Just receiving their first payment for their first month of work, immediately, you see people a bit more uplifted.
“Just a lot of elation about having that hit their bank account and getting paid for rugby.
“For those who haven’t played in England, they haven’t been paid consistently for rugby. They’ve been paid when we’ve been in camp, but not effectively as a job and now they’re getting this six-month paycheque.”
In the Pacific Four Series so far, the side were 26-14 losers at the hands of Canada in front of a record crowd in Kansas City, Missouri in the first round before a 27-19 loss to Jo Yapp’s Australia in the second.
This year, the team will oppose England in the opening game of the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup and are hoping to turn a promising 2024 into tangible results.
By making their players full-time for the duration of this tournament, it leaves little room for error as the group gets to focus purely on rugby for an extended period of time and develop together as a team in the weeks leading up to their date at the Stadium of Light.
There is even a moment of reflection in all of this.
Since the first women’s edition of the World Cup in 1991 (which the USA won) unions have gone about their business in entirely separate ways.
As the years have progressed, more and more teams have opted to pay their players full-time and introduced maternity plans to assist their players.
In a recent interview with RugbyPass, the Women’s Eagles most-capped player, Hope Rogers, recalled having to pay to represent her country at the start of her international career.
Up until now the USA have been unable to offer anything close to that level of support and Rugby Canada have been on the hunt for extra financial support in their aim of lifting the newly christened World Cup trophy.
There is a hope that these contracts will not be a flash in the pan for the Eagles and could even be offered to their male counterparts in the years to come too.
“In the 90s it was all pay-to-play,” Zackary said, “in the 2000s maybe events were paid for, but you weren’t paid, and then you have recessions and other things that affect unions.
“What is great is post-Covid, everyone went through a rebuild. We were hit quite hard as a union and we’ve been finding our way back.
“Women’s sevens has put USA Rugby on the map after their Olympic finish, and it puts pressure on us to do just as well. There are a lot of eyes on us.
“I think it’s massive. Hopefully, by the end of this decade, we’ll have consistent contracting and opportunities for more professionalism in the sport.”
