Territorial Season Wrap Up/Debate

Part of me is shocked that two weeks ago was NASCs.

Back in February, the official start of my season, it was soooo far away.

Depending on what territory you play for the road to NASC was either a full blown season or the traditional camp plus warmup match. I enjoyed the full blown territorial season that MARFU played but that was not a universal feeling. But before we start to discuss that thorny issue, that's talk about what MARFU's season looked like.

Sun Mar 09 Open Camp Richmond
Sun Mar 16 Open Camp Baltimore
Sat Mar 29 Invitational Camp DC
Apr 12/13 Pacific / Pac Dev San Francisco
Sun May 04 South Raleigh
Sun May 25 NRU / Dev Match Philly

So five weekends of select side competition before NASC. What did we accomplish in those five weekends? We didn't really accomplish a ton in terms of finding our stride. Part of that can be attributed to the order in which we played the games. Playing Pacific the first was a great challenge but the South game, because of the score, allowed us to play sloppier than we should have been comfortable with. Then we faced a very tough NRU team, only to lose another winnable game.

There's been a lot of debate about the effects of having a territorial season on clubs. Fundamentally there are two perspectives, the club oriented and the player oriented.

For some the club is most important organizational unit in women's rugby. According to this perspective, the existence of a territorial season is only beneficial if it does no impact on the spring club season. Players opting to not play for their club, some not even practicing, is unacceptable outcome of a dedicate select side season. The lack of select side players creates a host of problems from this perspective: lack of numbers, leadership issues and an inability to develop teams for the fall competitive season.

The player oriented perspective views the territorial season as a way to develop individual players across the board. From this perspective, when each TU actually participates in the territorial season, you'll have a similar number of players from the strongest teams opting out of their spring club season. This will create great parity in the club season and allow developing players a middle ground between full senior side games and developmental games. In essence you're creating an appropriate level of challenge for all the players involved: select side players of the TU season (and WNT assemblies), new senior side players get a chance to act in greater leadership roles on their home clubs and developmental players get the opportunity to develop their skills against an appropriate challenge.