MLR Draft Preview: Get to Know Campbell Robb, Potential Seawolves Target
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Campbell Robb runs with the ball during a rugby match in South Africa. Credit: USA Rugby/Instagram [/caption]
Leaving your homeland behind is never an easy decision. And for Campbell Robb, a young Kiwi hooker, there was an extra reason to stay home: a four-year contract with the academy of the National Provincial Championship’s Waikato Mooloos. But all the same, the young rugger went far away.
“I left those opportunities to go and have something new, get a degree, and play rugby in a country that I had never visited before,” Robb said. “I had aspirations to come to America to travel and experience new things.”
So he reached out to universities in America, sending out his highlights. They got the attention of Central Washington University Wildcats head coach Todd Thornley, and so Campbell Robb went from the North Island to the Northwest.
What he didn’t yet know was that he was on track to becoming an American. But during his college career, he found out that because he was spending most of his time in the United States for university, he could qualify to play in the USA Eagles national team – as long as he spent no more than two months outside the United States.
“I decided that the next long term goal was to play for the Eagles,” Robb said. “So, we gotta do everything right from here on out.”
Robb was certainly doing things right on the rugby pitch. In his very first match for CWU, the freshman hooker scored the Wildcats’ first try of 2022. Robb scored a total of three tries in the regular season and immediately added on in the playoffs, notching a brace in the first 12 minutes of Central’s opening playoff match against Cal Poly.
Three tries in Robb’s sophomore campaign were followed up by six as a junior. Robb continued adding on in 2025 with eight total tries (including his first college hat trick), finishing his four years of university with 22 tries. Despite his incredible performance, Robb never felt like he was competing for the eagle eyes of outside scouts.
“I was lucky enough in my junior year to be named as a First Team All-American and was named again at the end of my senior season, but I really had no expectation of being a prospect in the MLR draft or being looked at in the USA Under-23s,” Robb remarked. “Those were obviously goals for me, but I had no expectation. I was just trying to put my head down and go to work.”
Lo and behold, the official Major League Rugby Instagram account released a graphic on August 7 titled “Top Prospects”. Among the five players displayed on the graphic is none other than Campbell Robb.
“It was a surreal feeling for a second,” Robb said about seeing his name listed as a top prospect. “I had to stare at my phone and make sure it was real.”
Standing at 6-0 and weighing 215 pounds, MLR sides may be looking for him to fill out his frame a little bit more before he lands a starting role. But he was clearly strong enough and fast enough to make it into the USA Men’s Eagles 2025 U23 tour in South Africa, where some of the best young American prospects played three total matches.
This was an experience that gave Robb a lot of perspective on the world of rugby. Not only was he thrown into a team with all sorts of players from the best rugby universities in America, he also played with multiple young MLR players such as Aidan King.
“Everybody has different coaches and everybody’s been coached differently. Some people learn at different speeds, but in that kind of environment when we’ve got three games in a short three week space – and we’ve never trained together – it’s very much learning on the fly,” Robb noted. “You’ve got to flush every ounce of doubt that you have.”
And in those matches, you can see how Robb can rapidly spring into action on the attack. In particular, Robb thrives on the driving maul, possessing a strong ability to quickly dart off the action and land the ball over the try line. The following clip shows two plays from the recent U23 tour and show him landing tries on the maul. In the first play, you can him take advantage of his team’s drive over the line and find a hole in front of him, while in the second play, he works around to the blindside and then breaks off for the try zone once he sees that there is space.
His explosiveness also helps him on defense, and he has a good awareness of the game and general positioning. He has solid footwork for redirection, though it can be improved with repetition. In this clip, you can see an opposing player nearly make a breakaway and turn Robb around a little bit. It takes him a couple steps to redirect his footing and shift gears, but he does do so effectively due to his speed, assisting a teammate on the tackle.
Robb is also a largely accurate lineout thrower, consistently getting it to his teammates. However, I did notice one non-straight throw in the U23 footage that became an opposing scrum. Still, he does what he needs to do.
Overall, Robb would be a strong pick for a team that is looking for a hooker. I would have thought him a good fit for the San Diego Legion, but with their merger with Los Angeles, they will now likely be relying on Ben Sugars at that position – though California could very well still look to him for depth.
Hooker is a deep position for the Seattle Seawolves, though if Robb is still available in later rounds, we could very well see Robb running with the pack for 2026.
However, it’s worth noting that we don’t currently know how many rounds there will be in the 2025 Draft. Last year’s draft had three rounds, but the contraction of MLR from 12 teams at the time of the 2024 draft to just eight for 2025 would reduce the amount of slots from 36 to 24, creating speculation that there will be an extra round in this year’s draft.
Despite this, Robb said that he’s not spending a lot of time thinking about whether or not the number of spots will affect him.
“It’s not too much added pressure on myself, because my job’s done. I just have to wait and see who calls and ultimately where I’ll be headed,” Robb said. “It’s a lot of added pressure on the coaches from these other teams that are still around.”
Robb indicated multiple organizations in Major League Rugby were already in contact with him, though he did not say which. Ultimately, his hope is that when draft day comes on August 21, 2025, an MLR team will be looking for a domestic hooker.
He’s entering a world of rugby that’s facing a whole lot of turmoil, but that’s not a new thing for Robb. Earlier this year, Central Washington announced that it was cutting both its rugby programs – the university’s only DI programs – due to financial issues.
It was something that blindsided him and the Central Washington community in general. There was just an emergency meeting one day, focused more at the juniors and below (the classes who would no longer have a team in their following academic year), but with seniors encouraged to show up.
“We sat in a classroom with half the men’s team and a couple [players] from the women’s team and all four of the athletic directors walked into the room,” Robb recalled. “We kind of knew, they didn’t even really have to say anything. Heads were down, they didn’t want to look us in the eye.”
At that point, Robb got messages from rugby players from an array of places, his peers just as shocked as he that one of the nation’s top rugby programs was gone in an instant. They all had a similar question: what the heck just happened?
“We couldn’t really give them an answer,” Robb said. “Because we never really got a good answer, apart from that it was a financial issue.”
CWU’s loss of the rugby programs means that there is one less top school in the nation to compete. And it leaves an even sourer taste in Washington rugby, as it was by far the biggest rugby university in the Pacific Northwest, producing a good amount of MLR talent along the way.
Oddly, though, it seems the Seawolves weren’t all that close with the Wildcats, despite their proximity.
“In my time coming there, we only had one of the Seawolves coaches come down there and watch a training session once, talking to a couple of our coaches,” Robb noted. “They didn’t really reach out too often, which is a little bit interesting, considering we were the only team in Washington that was a bit of a powerhouse.”
That being said, the Seawolves have certainly drawn on Wildcat talent over the years. Rhys Jones, a rostered flyhalf for Seattle, is a CWU alum, as is Calvin Liulamaga, Seattle’s 2024 first-round draft pick. Although Jones was on one matchday 23, neither of them saw any minutes during the 2025 season.
Major League Rugby and USA Rugby, on the other hand, were more actively involved with the Wildcats. But it raises a question about the future of the American rugby system and whether there will be – or needs to be – a more formal structure to the American rugby pyramid.
“I don’t get paid the big bucks to make those decisions,” Robb said, “But at the end of the day, it really is a grassroots level issue … it’s all starting from a young age, when people pick up their first rugby ball, throw it around for a little bit, and think ‘wow, this is actually really cool.’”
That’s how Campbell Robb got started in the game. He remembers when his father, a player for the Morrinsville Sports Rugby Club in Morrinsville, New Zealand – a small dairy-farming town on the North Island – took him down to his local rugby club and introduced him to touch rugby. He recalls being barefoot on freezing-cold winter grass, but growing that love for the game all the same.
Where in MLR the kid from Morrinsville will end up is something that will only be answered on August 21.
