The 2025 MLR season comes to a close next weekend when New England and Houston compete for the title at Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It’s a 10,500+ stadium that is home of the Rhode Island FC, of the USL. It will be a contest between a team with the most Canadians in the league, New England, against a team with no Canadians, Houston.
The BCRU released their annual report with financials. The 2024-25 Annual Report in .pdf format is available for viewing online. We’ve highlighted some quotes below and a graph of their numbers. An overall evaluation, from my point of view, is that they’ve done well at the age-grade levels growing the game, the Kamloops 7s is a case in point. There’s work to do in the high performance end, especially with the senior men which has been quiet at the regional and provincial level. The reality is the financials are one of the major constraining factors which is why they brought in a new CEO to tackle that issue.
A couple of stories from across the world involving Canadian rugby players. Tyler Duguid who plays for Montpellier in the Top 14 has been selected for the France XV vs England XV. It’s unclear whether this is the official France “A” team which would capture Tyler for France and eliminate him from potential Canada selection down the road or if this is just a France XV which doesn’t officially capture him for France. Either way the chances of him playing for Canada now seem very slim. The match will be streamed on rugbypass.tv on Saturday.
It’s late Thursday and on a slow rugby news day I’m calling the #TBT option, Throwback Thursday. It all started when RugbyPass the news site owned by World Rugby ran an article on club championships around the world, you can read the article here. It was titled, “Every champion in club rugby across the world in 2024/25”, of course Canada wasn’t mentioned, it mentioned South America, USA, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, England, Netherlands, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Romania, Georgia, Argentina, Japan, South Africa, NZ… but not Canada.
The Canadian women assemble for a camp in Perth, Ontario from June 20 to 27 before departing to South Africa for matches on July 5th and 12th. The 33 players from the Pacific Four Series are joined by 5 additional players Sophie de Goede, Madison Grant, Paige Farries, Pamphinette Buisa and Carissa Norsten. The big news is the return of Sophie de Goede, her first action since she tore her ACL about a year ago. After the training camp 32 players will be named for the travelling squad.
The Rugby Premier League kicked off on Sunday, it’s a 2 week 7s tournament in Mumbai, India. The reason it’s of interest to Canadian rugby fans is there are 7 Canadian players competing. The competing players are Liam Poultan (Bengaluru Bravehearts); Kyle Tremblay, Ethan Turner, James Thiel (Kalinga Black Tigers); Elias Hancock, Rhys James, Briar Barron (Mumbai Dreamers). There are 6 teams in the league and 3 have Canadian players.
There are 23 Canadian players taking part in the MLR quarter-finals, 4 of the players aren’t on the Canada extended list Guiseppe du Toit, Reegan O’Gorman, Seth Purdey, Josh Larsen with Ethan Fryer listed as Injury Pending.
The Canada Summer Games are taking place in St. John’s, Newfoundland between August 8-25. The Rugby 7s takes place Aug 11-13. In 2022 it was just U18 women’s Rugby 7s, won by BC, but in 2025 it will be men’s U20 and women’s U18 Rugby 7s.
The BCRU continues to fine tune the balance of trying to raise the level of play in the BC Premier through import players with the responsibility of developing domestic players. Their latest decision is that a maximum of 7 import players can be in a match day 23, or in other words, 16 domestic players (ie. eligible to play for Canada) have to be in the roster. This applies to the BC Premier team and the team they enter in the Division One league.
I think Canadian rugby pundit Bryan Ray summed up the list nicely, “An interesting… and at the same time somewhat confusing list. Some rather obvious names are absent with no mention at all in the release… including a couple big names I was told would be in.” The obvious names missing are Tyler Ardron and Tyler Duguid, if they’re not listed, then they should be in the Declined category that RC published but which seems incomplete. There should perhaps be another category, TBD or Unknown.