Pro players to light up USA 7s

Featuring eight top quality sides six of which are full international teams the tournament will also include a large number of professional womens 7s players with Canada, USA and Netherlands all featuring contracted players.

Last month USA Rugby gave eight of their top players fulltime professional contracts and that group are now living near and have fulltime access to the Olympic Training Centre in Chula Vista

All of the players that signed training contracts with USA Rugby will compete in the tournament with either the Eagles or the USA developmental team, the Stars and Stripes who have also entered a team.

Deven Owsiany, who recently signed a full-time training contract with USA Rugby, has been named the captain of the side, a vote of confidence for the talented youngster.

The other teams to compete are France, Japan, Canada, Canada A (Maple Leafs), Brazil and the Netherlands.

Canada will travel as favourites after their excellent 2011 and they won the most recent major 7s outing in Dubai back in December.

Since the tournament in Dubai, Canada have begun a programme called centralisation which has seen it relocate its top 22 players to Rugby Canada's new Centre of Excellence in Langford, British Columbia for intense high performance training over the next five months in effect fulltime training.

You can watch the womens 7s action from Vegas this weekend through theYour Scrumhalf Connectionwebsite. Matches are on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This year the matches on Saturday and Sunday will be broadcast from within Sam Boyd Stadium.