Titles came from the extremely successful U19 Club teams of Highland (Salt Lake County) and then United (Northern Utah County). Highland dominated high school rugby for something like 20 years by bringing import players (mostly from the South Pacific) and then United following that same model challenged them in 4 consecutive National Championship games winning one in 2010 in a fantastic game at Rio Tinto. If you look at the core roster of the BYU Championship run it is filled with the Highland and United players from those two programs and specifically from that 2010 national championship game.

USA Rugby eliminated the U19 designation in 2011 and made it basically impossible to import players to high school clubs. Highland then disappeared from the national high school scene and while United would play in the national championship games in both 2012 and 13 (winning in 13) and Herriman emerged as a fantastic high school club (ranked 2nd in the single school division in 13), Utah was no longer the undisputed king of high school rugby and consequently BYU Rugby did not have this huge disparity of talent to draw on as compared to the rest of the country.

The decline of BYU Rugby is directly tied to the poor player development over the past many years and the coaching staff's inability to recognize the changing landscape around them. When I have spoken to foreign players who started for multiple seasons at BYU they do not have great praise for the BYU coaches.

I get it that there have been significant personal and family health challenges for the coaches over the past several years, and that the BYU administration may have made things more challenging, but this staff shoulders most of the blame for the program's decline.