Jack Iscaro: How Stade Francais 'Took a chance on an American prop'

Packing up his Washington DC apartment in a single afternoon, Jack Iscaro had little idea that his next trip home would come only after a Top 14 semi-final in front of 67,000 fans.

Called in as a medical joker by Stade Francais in October 2025, the Eagles’ loosehead has since become a fixture in one of the most feared scrums in French Rugby, earning a contract extension within two months and playing his part in a remarkable turnaround for the Parisians.

Glancing back at the whirlwind of his arrival, Iscaro admitted the move came almost as a surprise, even to him.

‘I got on a Zoom call with two of the coaches, and it was kind of more of a conversation, like, ‘Oh, well, when you get here,’’ Iscaro told RugbyPass. ‘And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, so I’m going over, I guess.’

‘I basically moved out of my apartment that day and got on a flight two days later. I didn’t leave until the following year, until we lost in the semi-finals.’

Born in Germany to an Italian father and an American mother, the 29-year-old’s route to Paris has been anything but conventional. His father, a Roman who played to a high level before injury pushed him into coaching, introduced him to the game, with weekend Six Nations fixtures streamed on dubious websites that would cut out every few seconds.

Later serving as one of his coaches at Gonzaga College High School, his father became something more than a parent on the training paddock, a dynamic that Iscaro credits with strengthening their bond.

‘It took away the weirdness of father-son, and it was just more like he was a coach or a friend,” he said. ‘I think it actually helped our relationship a lot.’

Few schools in American rugby can match what Gonzaga has built. Delving into the culture of the Washington DC powerhouse, Iscaro painted a picture of a programme that is unparalleled stateside.

‘There’s nowhere else in the U.S. that has the depth that they do,’ he explained. ‘It’s 900-something kids, an all-boys school, and when I was there, we were close to 300 kids playing. There were at least four to five teams deep, and there were no cuts.’

‘We would travel almost every weekend to play the best teams around the U.S., and we would go abroad once a year for spring break. We hadn’t won a national championship yet, and then we won two in a row when I was there, and then they won a third after and started a bit of a dynasty.’

Yet that dynasty grew from humble roots.

‘When it was first started, they weren’t even allowed to use the school’s name because they were just a club,’ he said. ‘They called themselves the Eye Street Rugby Club, because that’s the street in DC Gonzaga’s on. It built interest and legitimacy, and then it grows from there.’

Clearly highlighting rugby’s accessibility and success as the twin engines behind that growth, Iscaro believes the model holds lessons for the wider American game, particularly for athletes whose football careers have stalled.

Long believed to be an unfulfilled market, the opportunity for American football players to take their athleticism to Rugby is something Gonzaga has promoted to great success.

‘They were a football player their whole life and realised maybe they weren’t gonna cut it anymore, so they’ve tried something else and realised their athletic career doesn’t have to end there,’ Iscaro said.

Moving on from his high school days, Iscaro had several collegiate rugby options to consider. Rather than taking the comfortable route to Penn State, where his brother had played and he already knew the coaches, Iscaro headed west to Cal, a decision made he made with the sole priority of being tested in an unfamiliar environment.

‘I could probably tell you exactly what my next four years is gonna look like if I went there, and it probably would have started with me doing pretty well from the get-go and not being challenged too much,’ he said.

‘When I got out to Cal, I realised I was a pretty good rugby player, but there were levels to rugby, and I wasn’t just gonna walk through it.

‘I definitely wasn’t a superstar when I first got there.’

Returning home to join Old Glory DC at the conclusion of his college career, Iscaro took his first steps into the realms of professional rugby. Far from a childhood dream, the unassuming Iscaro felt privileged to represent his hometown in a team that did not even exist when he was growing up.

Thrown into the deep end in an MLR era awash with imported talent, it was sink or swim for the dynamic loosehead.

‘Every team’s first signing was usually an international tighthead,’ he said. ‘I remember being really frustrated at times because I was struggling in the scrum against a lot of these big foreign tightheads.

At peak frustration, his situation was put into perspective by his coach at the time, ‘Well, if you want to play international rugby, I don’t know how to break it to you, they’re all gonna be foreign.’

‘In that sense, it actually prepped me pretty well. I had an organisation that was willing to just trust in me and play me a lot.’

Fittingly, it was on French soil that the door to the Top 14 first creaked open. Starring against Tonga in Chambéry in November 2024, Iscaro got the better of Bordeaux cornerstone Ben Tameifuna and walked away with a handful of scrum penalties. A France-based agent followed, then the best part of a year of silence, before an injury crisis in Paris finally opened the door.

Handed a start against Castres Olympique within days of landing, Iscaro paid tribute to the Parisian club for backing an unproven commodity.

‘They took a chance on an American prop to come over and play, which I think a lot of teams probably would have just not even considered me for that reason alone,’ he said.

‘For them to bring me over, and then to back me and sign me, I have a tremendous amount of appreciation to them.’

Settling into a nine-month campaign, almost double the length of anything he had experienced in the MLR, Iscaro found himself packing down daily against esteemed tightheads Giorgi Melikidze and Paul Alo-Emile, two scrummagers he rates among the very best in the league.

Breaking down the dark arts of the French scrum, the loosehead was vivid in his description.

‘It’s like chess versus checkers,’ Iscaro clearly relished explaining.

‘Southern Hemisphere scrummaging is very honest and direct; they’re gonna bring you down low and go through you. In the Top 14, you’re dealing with everything you could imagine, from angles to games, and the starting tighthead versus the reserve tighthead and the way they scrum could be night and day.’

‘Winning a scrum penalty in the Top 14 in front of a home crowd is probably one of the better feelings you can have.’

Revelling in a pack that nearly doubled the next side’s tally of scrum penalties last season, Iscaro is determined to transplant that culture into an Eagles set-up where head coach Scott Lawrence has handed him a leading voice at set piece.

‘It was probably the best cultural buy-in to a scrum that I’ve ever been a part of or ever seen,’ he said. ‘How do I get people to want to buy into something as well as these guys did? You try to build something, rather than tell people what to do.’

That task carries added weight with Rugby World Cup 2027 now just a year away. Drawn in Pool E, the Eagles open against France in Melbourne on 2 October before facing Samoa in Perth and Japan in Adelaide.

Crucially, Iscaro is not the only American front-rower battle-hardened in France. Stade Toulousain’s David Ainu’u, who joined the club’s academy as a teenager in 2017, boasts a trophy cabinet that would be the envy of most internationals, and the pair packed down against each other in only Iscaro’s third Top 14 outing.

‘I think a lot of people don’t even know he’s American over here,’ Iscaro said. ‘He holds a lot of respect in the Top 14 for his scrummaging and for his abilities. He’s a different example of an American; he did the espoir route, became JIFF, and has won God knows how many titles.’

Throw in Tonga Kofe’s recent spell at Leicester, and Iscaro believes a ripple effect is building, with recruiters sitting up and taking notice whenever a rival club takes a punt on an American prop.

Shifting tack towards Lawrence’s Moonshot 2031 project, which targets a quarter-final on home soil, Iscaro envisages a stable MLR that exports its best talent to the world’s top leagues while backfilling those spots with young Americans hungry for game time.

But in a refreshingly candid moment, the Paris-based prop refused to sell the overseas dream as an easy one.

‘If I’m completely honest, it’s really hard,’ he said. ‘You have to know what you want out of rugby. I haven’t been able to go to really any of my friends’ weddings. My brother and his wife had my first nephew, and I’m not there for it.’

‘You’re committing to what was an 11-month season last year, and you’re probably at a disadvantage being counted as a foreign player, so you really have to prove yourself.’

Still, Iscaro is convinced the raw material is there, pointing to the vast pool of American athletes who never make it to the NFL or NBA.

‘I think about all these basketball players and football players who were just unbelievable,’ he said. ‘I get it, your dream was to play in the NFL, and maybe that didn’t work out, but that didn’t need to be the end of your athletic career.’

‘Well, hey, do you still want to go play in front of 70,000 people and make a good living playing professional sport? There’s opportunities there.’

As for 2031, Iscaro remains optimistic, buoyed by how smoothly the US hosted this summer’s FIFA World Cup. Yet he is clear about where the responsibility ultimately lies.

‘I think it has the power to put more eyes on it and bring legitimacy to it,’ he said. ‘But a strong presence from your own country’s team at the World Cup matters. We always talk about inspiring, but our efforts to play well and to inspire are very important as well.’

From the Eye Street Rugby Club to the attritional weekly Top 14 action, Iscaro’s journey is proof of what the American pathway can produce. And if the Eagles can bottle even a fraction of that French scrum culture, Australia 2027 has the potential to be a historic campaign for Scott Lawrence and his Eagles.