Since the announcement that there would be a Collegiate 7s All-American squad competing in the Club 7s National All Star Championships in Chula Vista, Calif. in August, we haven’t heard much else, until now.

We now know the 7s AAs will assemble in Chula Vista for a camp Saturday, August 20, six days prior to the kickoff of the 7s NASCs. The budget for this assembly is still undetermined, so it’s unclear how many players will be invited. Eagles 7s coach Al Caravelli said he’d like to see 20, and 7s AAs head coach Alex Magleby indicated between 12 and 20 would be invited.

The final selections will be made by Magleby, but the Dartmouth head coach is conferring with Caravelli on a regular basis.

“It’s a separate deal than the international setup, just like the 15s team is, but we’re measured on how many of our guys eventually become National Team players, so it behooves us to make sure we’re coordinating as much as we can with the National Team coaches,” said Magleby. “That’s what we’ve been doing in 15s, and it’s what we’ll do in 7s.”

The group to be invited to the August camp will named next month, as will the rest of the 7s AAs staff. Magleby said his staff has already been identified, but did not want to divulge too many names before the coaches’ work and travel situations could be sorted out. The one coach Magleby did say would be on staff is David Fee.

Fee, Magleby’s former teammate with the 7s Eagles in the early part of the century, was also on staff with the High School All-American 7s team that won its division in the Las Vegas Invitational in February. During the spring, Fee coaches Brother Rice High School in Chicago.

Magleby said the All-American camp selections should preempt any territorial all-star selections, giving those who don’t make the AAs a chance to still compete in the NASCs in front of national selectors.

“Certainly, any of the college guys that don’t get picked that Al believes have a shot, he’s got the relationships to kind of build on that and get them into their all-star territorial teams,” Magleby said.

Caravelli seems upbeat about the direction the NASCs are heading, and specifically the formation and inclusion of the AAs.  

“The new guys that have been coming onto our team. last year was the first time in three years that a guy came out of a club championships, and it was only one guy,” said Caravelli. “The rest of the guys have been coming out of our collegiate ranks.”

RUGBYMag.com intends to name its 7s All-American team before USA Rugby tabs its first squad, so stay tuned to RUGBYMag.com for both lists and any news concerning domestic 7s this summer.

As the July 1 deadline for College Premier Division teams to decide whether they're going to stay in the CPD or reenter DI approaches, RUGBYMag.com has learned what we believe will be the result of DI conference realignment for the the 2011/2012 competitive cycles. 14 conferences and one independent team have been identified.

For the 2011/2012 season, conferences will be allowed to count a CPD team toward their minimum number of seven participants, per competitions committee chair Kevin Battle. Southern California, where Battle's UC Santa Barbara competes, is the only conference with less than seven teams. Battle said Southern Caliifornia is still in the process of finding its seventh team.

The chair said the competitions committee is also working on a way to give independent teams (so far the only one is New Mexico) a pathway to the playoffs, but one has not yet been determined.

With 14 conferences, there would likely be two at-large bids into the DI playoffs. Battle said the competitions committee does not want to determine which conference or team would receive those bids before the season starts, as they want to give teams something to play for. He indicated the competitions committee would likely take non-conference and inter-conference games into consideration when awarding the at-large bids.

So far, only LSU and Tennessee have confirmed their exit of the CPD. Others, like Dartmouth, UC Davis, Claremont Colleges, Army and Cal Poly have either hinted they may follow suit or are rumored to be doing so. For now, those teams and other participants in the initial CPD season are marked with an asterisk.

DI teams moving up from DII or lower: 14
New Conferences: 4
Total teams eligible for postseason: 98

Italics indicates Canadian teams