The American Raptors are a professional rugby union team based in the municipality of Glendale in Colorado. The team plays in the transcontinental Super Rugby Americas competition. Established as the amateur Glendale Raptors in 2006, the team became a professional club upon joining Major League Rugby as a founding member in 2017,[2] but they played there only three years, competing as the Colorado Raptors in their final shortened season of 2020 before withdrawing from the league.[3]
Following withdrawal from Major League Rugby, the team renamed themselves the Colorado XOs turning their attention to player development of players originally playing other sports, before becoming the American Raptors in 2021.[4]
History
The Glendale Raptors were founded as an amateur rugby club in 2006.[1][5] They won the national Division I Championship in 2011,[6] and were back-to-back winners of the Pacific Rugby Premiership in 2015 and 2016.
Glendale Raptors kit and logo in 2018.
In 2017, the Raptors were accepted into the professional Major League Rugby competition. The amateur Glendale teams were renamed the Glendale Merlins before the inaugural MLR season in 2018. The Raptors finished the MLR regular season in first place in 2018, but lost the Championship final to Seattle.[7] In 2019, the Raptors finished the regular season in sixth place and did not play in the finals.
The team was renamed the Colorado Raptors ahead of the 2020 season [8] but the season was shortened and eventually cancelled due to impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Withdrawal from Major League Rugby
Colorado Raptors logo (2019–20)
On April 9, 2020, the Raptors announced that they would withdraw from Major League Rugby, effective May 2, 2020,[9] the first team to do so. Their announcement explained their withdrawal by saying that "our greater responsibility lies in the development of American players who can win the World Cup for the United States."[9] Asked to explain how the Raptors withdrawing from the league would help to develop American rugby players, Glendale City Manager Linda Cassaday said that MLR had been founded with a core mission of developing American rugby players and originally had limited teams to three foreign players, although this expanded to five players before the first season began in 2018.[9] MLR had expanded from seven teams in 2018 to 12 in 2020 without having enough American players to fill out rosters and had raised the ceiling on foreign players to 10 per team.[9] The Raptors believed that both this overall number of foreign players and the higher proportion of foreign to American players no longer best served the goal of developing American players who could compete successfully in the Rugby World Cup, and therefore chose to withdraw from the league to better focus their efforts on the development of American players who could compete on an international stage.[9]
On March 12, 2020, MLR announced the season would go on hiatus immediately for 30 days due to fears surrounding the 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic.[16] It was cancelled the following week[17]
