JACK HANRATTY MOVED to San Diego in January, but by his own admission, he wouldn’t make much of a tour guide just yet.

“It’s great, the sun is shining, but I think I’ve spent about five weeks there,” Hanratty admits.

Few jobs in rugby present the logistical challenges of being head coach of the US Eagles, and as such, Hanratty spends much of his time on the move, checking in on players across the States and overseas in the UK and France.

“Since taking this job I’ve been on 42 flights, over 70,000 miles, and I’ve been flying for seven days and four hours, which is incredible.”

The most recent of those flights brought Hanratty back to Dublin, with his Eagles side in town to face the Ireland Women in Tallaght Stadium on Sunday [KO 1.45pm, TG4 Player/TG4 YouTube]. Landing almost two weeks in advance of the game, Hanratty has used the time to show his players around the place, going for dips in the Forty Foot and taking part in a session at his home club, Skerries RFC.

“Rugby’s not really traditional with a lot of the US girls, so you’re trying to show them what it’s like and what it can mean around the world. We’re trying to take every place we go to as an opportunity to learn a bit.”

Hanratty is learning plenty himself as he gets to grips with a challenging remit, the latest stop on his fascinating coaching journey. The Skerries native started to learn his trade at Leinster, joining the province as a development officer in his early 20s.

“I was five years with Leinster as a fairly low-level development officer, and I really enjoyed it. I remember you get your bag of kit for the first time, and I was a chubby little not-very-amazing rugby player that now is developing things and going into schools and all that sort of stuff, and I loved it, but you almost got the polo and felt like you knew what you were doing.”

He proved a quick learner, and having tried his hand at everything from bagman to Leinster A manager, an opportunity to coach in Canada opened up. Not the traditional next step for an eager young coach in the Leinster system.

“People look at you and say, ‘Oh my God, Nova Scotia!’, like it’s the Antarctic.”

Undeterred, Hanratty took the leap. At first, he tried to implement ideas from Leinster sessions with Joe Schmidt, before coming to the realisation he was now working with a different audience.

“You bring this (information) over, and you just realise how irrelevant it is, because you’re not dealing with the athlete that’s in front of you, you’re just using information you’ve been given. That completely changed my own mindset.

“I coached men’s and women’s [teams] side by side for years, and I was really lucky to coach different age grades and senior national team programmes with Canada, both men’s and women’s, but it’s so different.

“If you go in with a mindset about how rugby is played, you’re losing already because you’re not respecting the athlete that’s in front of you, the experience or even the athletic profile.

Hanratty's Canada 7s side won silver at the Paris Olympics. Dan Sheridan / INPHO Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO

“One of the things in North American and women’s rugby, particularly, they’ll give you a list of the things they’re not good at, and they don’t celebrate the things they are good at, or maybe even the sporting backgrounds and skills they’ve brought over. If you have an athlete from hockey or gymnastics or basketball or soccer, you’ve a very individual skill profile there with so many pluses, but they think that they’re still brand new to rugby.

“For me, they’re not, they’re brand new to rugby, but they’re not brand new to sport.”

The highlight of Hanratty’s time in Canada saw him coach the Women’s Sevens team to silver at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Last year, he was back working as head coach at the University of Ottawa, watching the Women’s Rugby World Cup in England as he felt the Test arena itch. In January, he started his new role as Eagles head coach.

Winning games is the primary aim, but there’s also a wider brief of growing the sport in the States, with the men’s and women’s World Cups heading to the US in 2031 and 2033 respectively.

“They’re so open-minded and that’s what I like. It’s a brilliant job, really enjoyable, and it’s not like any other. It’s a big country and you’re still trying to convince a lot of athletes that rugby is the sport to be.”

Rugby remains a niche, yet growing sport in the land of opportunity.

“America is such a massive country. You’ve got people that have come from club, from college, from other sports.

“We’ve so many different ethnicities and backgrounds, so we’re trying to find the common goal. With the Olympic success (in Sevens), people are starting to recognise it, see it, and rugby can only get better with that.

“I get a lot of messages and emails about how do I play for the Eagles. In Ireland, it’s quite simple: you find your club, or play for your school, play for your province, you now play Celtic Challenge, you play for your country. It’s pretty fluid.

“With us, we have to be very, very open-minded. There’s players that get scholarships to go to Ivy League schools like Harvard and Dartmouth, incredible experiences. There’s players we have in a new professional league, the WER [Women's Elite Rugby], that people are very open-minded to; we have players in the college game, players in Sevens, players that have just crossed over from lots of other sports.”

The athletes are out there, but the challenges are multi-layered. For a start, Hanratty outlines the number of games his players get to play outside Test windows. To combat that, he’s open to ideas like sending his 15s players into Sevens and U20s camps.

Then, a player he might see as suited to one position could be needed to play somewhere else in a college team, therefore not getting the reps in the position Hanratty sees as their home. He references a 19-year-old out-half who now has five games at 10 for the US, more than she’s managed for any club or college team during her development. Some haven’t played any 15s rugby until they move over from Sevens into the Eagles squad. And for many, too many of the club/college games simply aren’t competitive enough.

“You just have to think outside the box: how can we focus on the haves of USA rugby rather than the have-nots?

“Like, I could put myself in a different state every weekend of the year and there would be rugby on. We’re not missing rugby, it’s just the quality to challenge the athletes and to make them better.

“The issues that we have and the innovation that we have is just so different to every other country, but you deal with the cards you’re dealt.”

Hanratty’s Eagles have already competed in the Pacific Four Series this year, losing 48-15 to New Zealand before beating Australia 33-12 and falling to a 50-12 loss to Canada. A tour to South Africa followed, losing the first Test 34-12 before coming back to win the second 26-19.

They come to Dublin ranked eighth in the world, with Hanratty very much seeing his side as the underdogs against Scott Bemand’s Ireland (fifth).

And in the early days of his reign, they are very much a work in progress.

The US Women's 7s squad won bronze in Paris. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

“I want them to be able to have a rugby IQ that they get to make decisions. I think an American mindset is that, with the predominant sport American football, the coach is the big personality, the coach makes the call and you have to get your X’s and O’s right.

“When I came in I was trying to explore the game and people were looking at me going, ‘God, this fella is just trying to come in and be all French’, but from my perspective I was trying to explore the game a bit more and grow the rugby IQ.

“We do have the athlete profile, but unless we become an Eagles programme that is the smartest Eagles team in history from a rugby IQ point of view, we won’t get to where we want to get to, we won’t put the athletic profile with the rugby player.

“But it’s not easy, and you also have to be OK with failing. 

“At times, there might be people watching on TV that go, ‘Oh God, what a stupid error!’ but in my mind you have to learn the hard way, and learn by doing. If you play in fear, well then you’re never actually going to trust yourself to give an offload or kick the ball in open play and try and regather, and that’s where we’re trying to get to.

“One of our lines that we say here is that if we fail, we fail fast and we get up and we try it again.”

These are key years for the sport in America, a market World Rugby would love to properly tap into. The women’s Sevens team will look to build on their Paris bronze at the LA games in 2028, before those back-to-back men’s and women’s Rugby World Cups later down the line.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Sevens or 15s, rugby is going to be on the screens (in the US) and if I’ve learned anything about USA sport, they want to win at all costs,” says Hanratty.

“They’re skilful players and trusting that is going to be really, really important, but that’s part of what we’re trying to do here, actually go to places and meet with the community, have open training sessions. 

“I’m not this person that’s going to reinvent the wheel with the game of rugby. If people want to come and see it and steal our way we’re going to exit or something, that’s fine, because I think the bigger way is the ability to connect with younger rugby players, bring them down, show that women’s rugby is just so accessible. 

“Like, we’re still selling this game to the athletes that are even wearing the logo.

“But that makes it fun as well because you want this environment to be good. We’re very lucky that we’re building on our contracts, we’re doing everything we can to make sure we pay the athletes, but it’s still women’s rugby, so you’re certainly not competing with Major League Baseball or basketball over in the States, but we’re getting closer and trying to validate the athletes’ commitment level to it, and the bigger picture, we know in seven years’ time, we want that World Cup to work.”