Editorial – January 2026

How Many Rugby Clubs in BC? A Look at the Numbers and Comparing to the Province of Buenos Aires

How many rugby clubs are in BC? Sounds like an easy question but it depends on how you define a rugby club. This all started with a conversation with Les Cusworth, the former Director of Rugby of the Argentina Rugby Union, comparing the number of rugby clubs in the province of Buenos Aires with the number of rugby clubs in the province of British Columbia. Simple right, maybe. If you start with wiki, it will tell you 65 rugby clubs for BC and “76 clubs directly affiliated and 15 competing as guests” so 91 altogether for Buenos Aires. The information is dated, Les says there are over 100 clubs now in Buenos Aires. The BCRU states it has “66 registered community rugby clubs across BC” in its recent documents, that number matches with the 2025 AGM Voting Allocations for Voting Members document. How does that number of 66 correlate with number of clubs we see in the league structure, Premier, Div 1, Div 2, Div 3 for men and women which is 31? It depends how you define rugby club.

Here are two criteria I found online:
– Clubs serve local communities and are connected to national governing bodies (Unions) and participate in organized competitions.
– Player Development: They focus on developing players from grassroots levels (youth) to senior teams.

I took the BCRU voting document (see below) and added a column to the right and sorted by that to make it a little clearer. We have 31 clubs who play in senior leagues, September to May, marked as League, many of these are multi-team clubs. We have 11 clubs who play in the summer leagues competing for the Saratoga Cup, many of these are single team clubs, so 42 clubs when we combine both winter and summer leagues. We have 6 clubs who compete mostly in the Over 35 competitions, there are other clubs that have Over 35 teams but we’re counting clubs not teams, so that’s 48 on aggregate now. There are 2 university clubs that don’t play in club leagues but just university leagues, that’s TWU and UBC Okanagan, so 50 now.

Now starting eliminating registered entities that aren’t really clubs in the traditional sense, the Ref Society, the BCRU, the sub-unions including the Yukon, the Highlanders aren’t active now. We have a couple of exceptions that I’ve marked as Touring Clubs, they don’t play in a structured league, Thunder Rugby and Canadian Classics, so up to 52 now. Finally there are the youth clubs, some are part of an existing club but for admin reasons are listed separately, like Cowichan Youth. We’ll count 5 there, so 57. We counted TORA as a sub-union.

So how many active clubs are there in BC? It depends, 31 in the winter leagues, 11 in the summer leagues, and when you add in the Over 35 clubs, youth clubs not affiliated with a club, university clubs not in club leagues, touring clubs, then 57 is the number.

Les sent this link to the Buenos Aires league structure, I haven’t gone through the numbers but there’s 3 Premier leagues, A, B, C that have 14 unique clubs each. Then there are all the lower leagues and even a league above Premier, Top 12. Just the University league has 15 teams with 2 divisions. The University of Buenos Aires has separate teams for Agriculture (2), Medicine, Veterinary, Engineering plus 10 other universities.

It’s an interesting comparison, the province of Buenos Aires has about 3 times the population of BC and has about 3 times the rugby density in clubs. There’s lessons to learn there and hopefully a partnership between Buenos Aires and BC will grow.

Next project would be to count the number of school rugby programs in BC. Anyone from the school system want to take that on?

REFERENCE LINKS

THE ORGANIZATION: BC RUGBY
British Columbia Rugby Union, commonly known as BC Rugby, is the recognized governing body for rugby union in
the Province. BC Rugby is a Not-For-Profit organization and one of 60 Provincial Sport Organizations (PSOs) to receive funding from the Provincial Government. BC Rugby comprises over 7,000 members and 66 registered community rugby clubs across BC.

Voting Allocations of Voting Members