Hanratty's Eagles era set to begin: What can we expect from underdogs USA in Pac Four?

In the days leading up to revealing his first squad as head coach of the USA, Jack Hanratty took in an NBA game with colleagues. Canada’s lone top-tier basketball side, the Toronto Raptors, were squaring off against the hometown Denver Nuggets.

Irish-born but a duel-citizen – spending long enough coaching in Canada to earn a passport – Hanratty made sure to sing along to the pre-match rendition of O Canada. The image of the new Eagles head coach singing the anthem of a neighbour prompted playful ribbing from the American contingent sitting alongside him.

A former Coaching Development officer with Leinster, Hanratty once prepared a report for Joe Schmidt after spending a summer coaching in Canada. He subsequently moved back across the Atlantic in a full-time capacity, coaching the Canadian Sevens team to Olympic silver in 2024.

The thirty-something coach inherits a USA side wounded from the World Cup. The Eagles came in with high hopes but after a trouncing against England in the opening Rugby World Cup 2025 match in Sunderland, and a thrilling but ultimately unprofitable 31-31 draw against the Wallaroos, their campaign ended at the pool stages.

Anthem barbs aside, he is aware of potential perceptions that may or may not build in his new job. “I’m not a Canadian-Irish man coming in and telling America how to play rugby,” he says as his first assignment in the Pacific Four Series approaches.

“A lot of them are very experienced athletes and players. I’m not coming in to dictate and play, we’ll know our style of play and what we want to do in two years.”

After Denver, Hanratty returned to his new home of San Diego. This after spending much of the early year in Europe working with American players in the PWR and Élite 1.

“We’ve coined it ‘Eagles first,’” he says of his approach. “Would I rather fly 24 people to the United States or two coaches to England? That’s a pretty easy answer for us, that to me is putting Eagles first, rather than the norm.

“We’re getting the benefits of European play, we want to continue that. But we also don’t want that if a player wants to play for the Eagles, they have to move to England. That is really big for us that we don’t buy into, this is the one pathway to play for the Eagles.

“We don’t just say, a player has signed a contract in the UK, they’re fully serviced, they’re done. Is their S&C good? Is their competition good? Is their daily environment good? Are their training facilities good? Hopefully the answer to all those questions is, yes, but if it’s not, how can we still help? That is why we were doing a camp in Europe. Let’s do that more than once a year.”

On Saturday 11th April, Hanratty’s first game in charge brings a difficult task as the Black Ferns come to Sacramento for the opening game. The Eagles will have home advantage throughout the competition as the Pacific Four Series 2026 remains in the USA, with Kansas City and Chicago acting as hosts for the following weekends.

A group of 32 players, trimmed down from the 37 that originally came into camp, was picked a few weeks ago but only recently announced. Sevens superstar Ilona Maher, who did feature in the World Cup, is not involved this time around.

“Ilona is going to slowly get back into Sevens,” explains Hanratty. “She’s been off rugby for a while so it would be unfair on her to bring her in. I got to chat to her, it was great.

“The nice thing here is that we’re starting to bring the sevens and 15s together, that’s new. We’re trying to make it a little bit more fluid and that will benefit a player like Ilona for sure.”

Of the 32 players available to Hanratty, 17 are based in England playing the PWR. One – Hallie Taufoou – is in Bordeaux. The rest come from Women’s Elite Rugby (WER, the US domestic league), universities or the sevens programme, where access to top end competition, similar to what’s available in Europe, has varied.

“Domestically, they need to play more and more,” says Hanratty when asked what his biggest obstacle will be. “I think we’re investing in the right way, we just want to get the athletes to experience high pressure failure and success.

“Right now, if you play domestically, you’re not in the same rugby context in terms of, five minutes to go, you’ve got to find a way to win, chase a bonus point or defend for your life. Those are the rugby context stuff that we don’t have domestically. Can we create that in our training environment?

“We ran a domestic camp in January for all the domestic players and then we tried to add a bit of innovation, so we did a camp in the UK for any European based players and they were so different. The domestic players right now are missing rugby. The European based players have way too much rugby. The load differences, I’d say S&C coaches around the world would freak out.”

Working with such a disparate group leaves an intriguing question: how will the Eagles under Hanratty play? As much as the next period is about experimenting, he clearly has thoughts. Ones that go deeper than the international team. Expect the US to slowly start kicking and offloading more.

“If I was a year out from the World Cup, I’d be very structured, here’s what we’re achieving and here’s how we do it. Now, I want to explore the game. We’ve used the term fail but fail fast. What does that look like from a skills point of view? Can we trust kicking to attack rather than kicking because that’s what we’re told to do? Can people get a last second offload? Can people adapt to different lines of running?

 

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“I had two calls, presentations the other day, with coaches across the country. I talked about ways for us to be innovative and I did a statistical analysis of the PWR, Élite 1 and USA at the World Cup but I added in the WER and the university game in America. We showed things like ball in play, kick metres, speed at the breakdown, offloads, we showed them the haves and the have nots.

“Ball in play time was huge domestically. That’s a great thing to be proud of, way bigger than the World Cup, the PWR. Why? The kicking skill isn’t very high here. They run it more. They tap penalties more, they don’t kick to touch because that skill isn’t there. So we under develop that skill, which means there are fewer line outs. We under develop the hooker throw.

“We discussed how we can be innovative in the kicking game. Internally, can I do a scoreboard in the WER that gives points to the best kicking team? In England, the kicking game is better than anywhere else so people might go, ‘That’s stupid.’ But it’s meeting us where we’re at, where our rugby is at. How do we change this collectively?

“That was, for me, something so exciting even though it is a negative because we’re not up to the top six teams at the moment.”

All this talk of exploration, innovation and new horizons builds giddy anticipation. That can change very quickly if results turn sour. Aware that his first day out comes against the Black Ferns, Hanratty jokes that he is still unbeaten for now. Goal-setting in such a novel environment may well be tricky.

“We could copy and paste me doing an interview with you in five weeks’ time where I say, ‘Listen, we’re just exploring, building depth, I’ve learned a lot.’ At the end of the day, the American mindset is, if they want to get excited about sport, they want to win. We know we’re ranked bottom of the PAC Four.

“We want to win games. That classic thing of, we’ve been together long, it’s a journey, I know all of that is fair. But we need to quantify what success looks like.

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“If we want to start promoting an offload game, which is what we want to do, then we also have to be ok losing possession. If I say, we have to have 100% offload success rate, well then if you throw one offload and it’s caught, that’s 100% and you’ve identified your KPI. If you say we want 100% of our lineouts, just win it at the front but that doesn’t give us the platform to play off.

“We have to be ok with the KPIs being less than what they would be if the ultimate goal was to win the World Cup.”

One of Hanratty’s uncapped call-ups, Bella Vogel, presents an interesting case study of the balance Hanratty needs to strike. Playing at Life University, Vogel is predominantly an inside centre. But she can kick off both feet – a crucial skill for a side that wants to develop its aerial game – and has playmaking ability that could suit out-half. Throwing such an inexperienced option into the deep end against New Zealand would be a risk, to say the least.

But does the potential upside make it worth taking? Time will tell. For now, Hanratty finds himself in a role where, seven-and-a-bit years out from a home World Cup, he is being given space to balance such conversations with the need to win. Given that canvas, he sounds enamoured by the challenge.