The inaugural season of the USA’s first ever professional rugby league, PRO Rugby, is well under way now, and so what better time to continue our examination of the league’s shirts, and today it’s the turn of perhaps the best of the lot – PRO Rugby Ohio.
The Ohio team are based in the Columbus suburb of Obetz, and the club’s players – most notably former Northampton centre Dominick Waldouck – will be taking the field wearing a rather unconventional shirt with a bold, red diagonal stripe, both front and back.
The look is pretty damn unusual for a rugby shirt, but it’s one that we think really works here – particularly with the lack of much on the front of the design, it works really well and adds some flair.
It looks even more striking against the deep blue body colour, and as with all the teams in PRO Rugby, the colours used here are a nod to local pro teams in other sports. And you don’t have to look hard in Ohio to find sports teams that are repping blue and red – pop over to Columbus and you’ll find the Blue Jackets NHL team donning that exact combo, while the Indians MLB franchise uses blue and red to complement their primary white and grey threads.
Speaking of grey, that’s exactly what the alternate shirt is – and really rather nice it is too. The grey could be another nod to the Indians, but we wonder if it’s also a nod to perhaps the most famous sports team in Ohio – the Ohio State Buckeyes.
If that is the nod the designers were going for, we’d have preferred the diagonal stripe to be red rather than blue to make it even more on the nose, but there’s no denying that the dark blue and grey do look rather good together.
Like the similarly grey Denver alternate shirt we looked at a few weeks back, we think that the change shirt is actually the better looking of the two, and in fact, it might be one of the most undeniably lovely shirts in the whole competition. The splash of red around the collar is a lovely touch, too.
Clean, classy, understated… and yet totally unconventional for a rugby shirt Champion System might be new to this rugby lark, but they seem to know what they’re doing…
UPDATE: The Ohio PRO Rugby team name has been chosen, so from next season, the team will be known as the Aviators. Nice.
Buy the PRO Rugby Ohio shirts from Champion System at World Rugby Shop
Rugby Shirt Watch 