Here to Grow USA Rugby.High Quality. High Performance.Speed is Key.

Rugby players in this country are used to being told the sport can't take them anywhere. We are building the opposite.

ZIP Rugby has an academic partnership with Walsh University. Rugby student athletes at Walsh can now intern with ZIP and receive 3 university credits for it. Not shadowing. Not fetching coffee. Real work on the business side of the sport.

What the internship actually is

Interns work across sales, marketing and social media. That means outreach to clubs and universities, building the pitch, sitting in on partnership calls, shaping campaigns, and running content that goes out to a real audience.

We are a young company. There is no layer of middle management to hide behind. If an intern builds something, it ships. If it works, they can point at it for the rest of their career.

That is the whole idea. A rugby player at Walsh gets to spend a semester learning how a brand is actually built, and the credits count toward their degree.

Fraser Leslie is first

Fraser is captain at Walsh, a Chicago Hounds player in Major League Rugby, and a ZIP endorsed athlete. He was just selected to the NCR All American Team.

Here is how he put it:

“Now, I'm excited to start my ZIP Rugby internship through Walsh University, gaining university credit and real-world experience in the business side of rugby through sales, marketing and social media.”

Fraser has been on our sales side already. Making it official through Walsh means the hours he puts in now count twice: once for ZIP, once toward his degree.

Why we are doing this

American rugby has a retention problem. Players graduate, the sport stops being part of their week, and they disappear from the game entirely.

The fix is not louder recruitment. The fix is careers. Sales, marketing, design, media, coaching, operations. Every one of those jobs exists in rugby, and almost nobody is showing college players the door into them.

So we built the door.

A player who spends a semester running ZIP's outreach knows how to sell. A player who runs our social knows how to build an audience. Those skills travel anywhere. But if they want to stay in rugby, now they can.

What's next

Walsh is the first. It will not be the last.

If you coach or run a rugby program and you want your players earning credit through U.S rugby, get in touch. We will work out the academic side with your institution.

And if you are a player at Walsh reading this: talk to us.

The work continues.