Rugby United New York re-signed Conor McManus for the 2023 Major League Rugby season. The 23-year-old scrumhalf is 5’10” (178 cm) and 187 lbs (85 kg).
Conor played 376 minutes in 11 matches, starting 4, and scored 2 tries for Rugby New York in 2022. He played 490 minutes in 15 matches (17 on the matchday roster and starting 4 times) and scored one try during the 2021 MLR season. This past Fall he played for Old Blue in the American Rugby Premiership.
Conor is from Timaru, New Zealand, and attended Waihi South School. He played basketball and rugby while there and for the South Canterbury U48 kg team when he was 12. He then attended Timaru Boys High School for two years until moving to Falls Church, Virginia in 2014 when he was 15. He played basketball while he was there for two years and then transferred to Annandale High School for his Junior and Senior years.
While at both Virginia High Schools, he played rugby for the Fort Hunt Warriors where his father Kerian and Dale Roach were the coaches. The team won the Virginia State Championship three of the four years he played and placed second and third at Nationals in 2017 and 2018, respectively. He was a Rugby Virginia All-Star, played for the Eagle Impact Academy’s first-ever U16s team, as well as the U17s, and participated in the European Championship in France with the U19s in 2017. That same year he was honored as a USA High School All-American and was selected to the USA U20s team, but due to injury, could not participate.
Following his graduation in 2018, he returned to New Zealand and was part of the Crusaders International High-Performance Unit for six months. He played for Canterbury’s U19s team, playing every game with the team losing in the National Final to the Bay of Plenty.
During the 2019-2020 season, he played for the Crusader Knights and for the Canterbury Mitre 10 squad. For the latter, he saw action against Wellington and Tasman.
Conor looks forward to joining Rugby United New York for the 2021 MLR season as a scrum-half. The good news for the USA National Team is he is U.S. eligible through his father who is a U.S. citizen.
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