Celebrating 10 Years of YSC!

I can’t believe it even as I write it, but YSC celebrates 10 years at the end of the month! Please join us over the next few weeks as we reminisce about a beautiful rugby story that began in late March 2006.

In our lifetimes, we are gifted with a limited number of truly “landmark moments”. They start small enough, like learning to tie your cleats, learning to throw your first rugby ball or getting your first start in a rugby match. But then, as we grow, these moments grow too. They grow in power and significance.

Looking back at our journey, we started as a small blog that covered rugby teams in the Western Rugby Union. We quickly morphed into covering all of women’s rugby in the USA as the need was so intense. Then we expanded to reporting on all women’s rugby across the globe.

In the beginning we didn’t track visitors beyond being excited that someone was reading what we wrote. We started tracking analytics in 2009 and the numbers are quite staggering:

• Since 2009 we’ve had 997,657 page views!!! Almost 1 million! The yearly average is 99,876 with over 18,000 annually returning visitors.
  • Our best year was 2014 (Women’s Rugby World Cup) with 211,320 page views.
• The biggest drivers to our site are Facebook, search engines (Google) and referrals.
• Top locations to visit the site are USA, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
• More remote visitors were Maldives, Tuvalu, Haiti, Swaziland and New Caledonia.
• Top pages overall were Women’s Rugby World Cup, Women’s Premier League, Videos, Nations Cup, and Strength and Beauty (Winona State Women’s Rugby).

Of course we couldn’t have done any of this without the support of a few key partners!

The Girl

I’d like to thank Traci “The Girl” for her continued support as she follows me on our many rugby adventures. It can’t all be bad if you’ve been to London, Paris, Germany, San Francisco, right? The tireless nights and moments missed because I need to be updating the site, etc…wouldn’t be possible without you.

I’d also like to thank Cole, our son for his continued support. 🙂 He went to his first rugby game at 2 weeks old and if we’re lucky, he will love rugby as much as we do.

Rugby Athletic

We started our partnership with RA in 2006 after a chance meeting at USA 7s in San Diego, CA. RA is a HUGE supporter of women’s rugby and YSC. Plus, their freaking sweet designs don’t hurt either. Over the years they’ve helped us design all these awesome items for YSC:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Want to get the newest RA YSC shirt? Send us a *NEW* photo of yourself in a YSC shirt, sunglasses or show us where you’ve stuck your YSC stickers.

They’ve also helped us design shirts for the West U23 Collegiates, TRU, TRRA, the Bluebonnets, etc. As you can see, whenever we need some sweet apparel or merchandise we turn immediately to RA.

Rucking Insurance

Kevin Sullivan is a huge supporter of women’s rugby and an amazing Oklahoma Sooner alum. He’s supported YSC since the beginning and has even let me sleep on his couch a few times! We can’t thank you enough for your support!