The WolfPack were featured in yesterday's New York Times Sports section. The have impressive media coverage focusing on the first ever trans-Atlantic professional sports team.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/s...tionfront&_r=0

For a Toronto Rugby Team, Some Games Are an Ocean Away

The third level of rugby league in England and Wales is something of a sleepy competition, played in towns like Merthyr Tydfil, Hemel Hempstead and Abingdon-on-Thames.

And Toronto.

This season, there is an incongruous presence in the little league: an expansion team from the largest city in Canada mixing it up with minnows of English rugby. And the logistics of the unconventional arrangement might be a preview of what the N.F.L. will have to deal with if it eventually installs a team in London.

On opening weekend, a league game between Oxford and the Hemel Stags drew 161 souls. But when the Toronto Wolfpack plays its first home game on May 6, Eric Perez, the team’s chief executive, says he expects to see 3,000 or 4,000 fans in the 10,000-seat Lamport Stadium.

Toronto is already showing itself to be more than a match for the division. The Wolfpack opened up with a 76-0 shellacking of the London Skolars and is now 3-0. It also scored a Cup win over the London Broncos, a team in the division above.

The success is not entirely unexpected, as the team has assembled a strong group of players for the division. “We got established league players that we knew could play at that level,” Perez said. “We had tryouts across North America.” The team includes three players who have captained their national teams: Ryan Burroughs of the United States, Rhys Jacks of Canada and Bob Beswick of Ireland.

Perez is not expecting to hang around the third tier very long: “The short term goal is to get promoted, the three-year plan is to get into the Super League, the five-year plan is to win the Super League,” the top level of rugby league in England. “Toronto doesn’t win anything, so I’d like to reverse that.”

A sports team whose rivals are all on another continent poses a series of unconventional problems, but Perez is optimistic that flexible scheduling and modern technology will mitigate any difficulties for the Wolfpack.

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The team is playing its first five league games in England to cut down on air travel (and give the Canadian weather time to warm up), and this is expected to continue in the seasons to come. The team members who do not live in England already are staying in a rented mansion 15 minutes from the team’s training center in Leeds.

Later in the season, though, the team will have to fly back and forth on multiple occasions.

“It’s only a five-hour time difference and a six-hour flight,” Perez said. He also said he was not too concerned about squeezing big men into coach seats. “There are no fat guys in rugby league. It’s one of the most cardiovascularly difficult sports in the world.”

Nonetheless, the team has enlisted Liverpool John Moores University to devise a program catered to each player’s biological makeup. The players will receive recommendations on what and when to eat and when to go to bed to minimize jet lag and other issues.

The team’s sponsorship deal with an airline will cover its travel costs as well as the costs for the British teams to come to Toronto.

A team from another continent and hemisphere competing in a league is exceedingly rare, though not unheard-of. In the first two seasons of the World League of American Football (later known as N.F.L. Europe), seven North American teams were joined by three from Europe.

Perez views crosscontinental leagues as the future of his sport and of others. He said there might well be rugby league teams in New York or Boston in the near future. And he thinks American football should get on board with a team based in London. “I’ve always wondered why the N.F.L. is hesitating to pull the trigger,” he said. “It’s the logical step.”