History
The IRB is investing $CAN3.12 million over a three-year period to establish the competition as part of the "Tier 2 initiative", which aims to promote rugby in countries where the sport is less popular. The tournament was created to provide an elite level of rugby below the international level for both Canada and the United States. The IRB and representatives from both Rugby Canada and USA Rugby held meetings during September 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts to finalise the inaugural tournament.
The 2006 competition was held in both British Columbia and Columbus, Ohio. British Columbia hosted the first leg in May, 2006, and Ohio hosted the return leg two months later, in July.
In the future, it is hoped that the competition will eventually introduce professional rugby to North America. It is proposed that by 2008, cities and private owners will take ownership of the franchises. It is also proposed that the competition will expand to six teams, and then eight. Two teams are most likely to be added in 2008, most likely one each from Canada and the USA.
Read more about this topic: North America 4
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)