Denver Meets NY in Women's Rugby Final
First Women's Elite Rugby championship is on June 29. My weeklong preview:
Women’s Elite Rugby heads into its first championship match this weekend, with the Denver Onyx taking on the New York Exiles for the Legacy Cup at 2pm CDT at TCO Stadium in Eagan, Minnesota on June 29.
The Onyx are favorites, finishing the regular season with a 9-1 record. The Exiles finished 6-4. In their first match of the season, on April 5 in Glendale, Colorado, the Onyx won 62-7. In a rematch in New York on June 1, the Exiles handed the Onyx their only loss of the season, 24-17.
WER is the first professional women’s rugby league in the US, with six teams from six different US cities — Denver, New York, Boston, the Bay Area, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Chicago. It replaced the Women’s Premier League, an amateur club league that launched in 2009 and grew to 10 teams in 2017.
Before the WER season kicked off, I spoke to WER President Jessica Hammond-Graf and Katherine Aversano, Executive Director of Athlete and Brand Integrity, both of whom played a key role in the founding of the league.
Towards the end of the 2022 WPL season, the coaches and league leadership got together and said “You know, we have an opportunity for change,” Hammond-Graf recalled. The WPL had been hit hard by covid and three teams had dropped out of the league. “So when everybody got together in 2022, Katherine and I were on the periphery of women's rugby and working in women's rugby in different spaces, and the league decided to seat a board, and so Katherine and I raised our hands and were vetted with a bunch of other women, and there were six of us who formed the first board of the WPL in 2023 and they gave us the task of ‘help us professionalize women's rugby’. And so that started the launch of what's been an 18-month passion project to help move the league in this direction.”
The creation of WER was formally announced in April 2024. “We did our formal launch at that point, and have been hustling ever since,” Hammond-Graf said. Hammond-Graf and Aversano sought out financial backing from private investors, family offices and some venture capital firms. “We have a little bit of everything,” Hammond-Graf said. “We are starting to build out our corporate sponsorship portfolio, and so revenue will come from them as well.” The WER also hoped to make money from ticket sales — ranging from $15 to $50 for a seat at the Legacy Cup — and merch, available on the web site and at matches.
Unlike most other rugby leagues around the world, the WER is not financially supported by the governing body, in this case, USA Rugby. WER’s board looked mostly at League One Volleyball and the Professional Women’s Hockey League as models to emulate, rather than other rugby leagues. “We have an opportunity to connect, to learn from each other, what they’re building,” said Hammond-Graf.
WER is also wary of falling into the trap of pitching rugby as a novelty. The first women’s national championship in the US was held in 1978 and the USA Women’s Eagles won the 1991 World Cup in England. There is a rich history of women’s rugby in the US.
Think about “how rugby is seen in this country,” Aversano said. “We're not really pushing, ‘Oh this is women's rugby.’ We are another women's sport that we know there's a market for.”