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When Syracuse University student Sean Cullen was living in Dublin, Ireland, for his senior sport management capstone surrounding a local rugby club, he dealt with sending hundreds of emails, early wakeups, a broken stove and worst of all, plastic water bottles with lids that didn’t come off.

Cullen couldn’t communicate with his school friends consistently because he was 3,000 miles away from SU in a different time zone — waking up to their goodnight messages and falling asleep as their days began.

But Cullen never fussed working alongside his new partner in crime, senior Patrick Breslin, fulfilling the same school requirement. In fact, he embraced these daily obstacles, knowing he’d experience the same things in his future sport management endeavors.

“I had almost no experience with rugby, so this was an entirely new industry and experience for me,” Cullen said. “But I’ve loved every minute of it.”

Cullen and Breslin were partners for their semesterlong, 12-credit capstone project through SU’s Falk College —a month of which was spent in Ireland doing promotional work for Leinster Rugby, a professional Irish rugby union team.

Through the SU School of Excellence program, the SU seniors worked for the club, which partnered with the university to popularize the sport in the United States. While the program primarily serves as a segway for professional development in New York, it now offers hands-on experience for Falk students.

“With the use of the partnership with Falk, with the opportunity given to the students to work on their capstone project, that galvanizes that strategic viewpoint from an American lens,” Colin O’Hare, Leinster’s on-site SU camp director, said.

The partnership is an effort to spread a sport that has existed as an SU club since 1969 but didn’t take much of a step forward until March 2023, when Leinster made an agreement with SU. Through training and professional opportunities for the men and women’s teams, the collaboration was intended to bolster the club-sport atmosphere. However, it’s become so much more.

Three years into the program, the focus has shifted from solely professional opportunities to those for youth. The idea to fold a sport management capstone into the program was the cherry on top of an eventful March.

“There’s an opportunity to look at how we can grow the same model back home at Leinster Rugby, where we develop our own local talent from the ground up,” O’Hare said.

Because Leinster is one of Ireland’s four rugby teams in the United Rugby Championship, they could accomplish more with their worldwide reach. With equipment and coaching already present, SU collaborated with Leinster to form the School of Excellence program to provide opportunities to kids as young as 6 years old to college students playing club rugby.

“We facilitate for three different types of players,” O’Hare said. “The players who are just coming to campus who have never seen the game and never heard of it and would like to play it, the kids who have played a bit of rugby and, obviously, that aspiring player who wants to play (Major League Rugby).”

O’Hare said the partnership first stemmed from SU’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Gabe Nugent. O’Hare claimed it didn’t take much to start the program, but it was several years away from its pinnacle.

However, New York isn’t a hotbed for rugby compared to states like California. The only way it can grow is for structured programs that help aspiring young athletes of all levels.

“We’re trying to integrate a product that makes (rugby) culturally USA-based,” O’Hare said.

The program is a comforting eight-to-one player to coach ratio with locations in Maryland and Colorado to extend outreach. SU’s campus is used during a six-day residential program, but it isn’t possible without publicity, which is where the students’ responsibilities come in.

When Cullen and O’Hare chose Leinster as their capstone in January, the most important objective on their radar was promoting the club’s brand. While they typed away on their computers in the Eastern Hemisphere, the work they completed was meant to catch traction in New York. When focusing on the objective of their capstone, they wanted an experience that was both new and a precursor for their sport management careers, specifically into marketing and outreach.

“(The goal was) trying to understand the American audience and how they would feel for rugby connecting Leinster and the American audiences together,” Breslin said. “Not only to promote the game of rugby in the U.S., but try and get a footprint of rugby in America before the World Cup is taking place here in 2031 and 2033.”

Breslin said the capstone’s aim is to create content to promote the camps through registration opportunities. He worked for the camp last summer as a counselor to get an idea for the types of promotions he’d need to work on. Based on Breslin’s experience as a counselor, he saw how the kids formed friendships together. The senior realized that the balance of friendships and structured training would appeal to kids ages 12 to 18.

Breslin’s friendship with Cullen also drove his capstone experience. Coming from a different friend group, Breslin didn’t know who Cullen was until this school year.

“We’ve been here for three-and-a-half years, and I’ve tried to get to know as many sport management students as possible,” Breslin said. “Sean’s been great to work with for this capstone experience. (I) can confidently say that we’ll continue this friendship even after college.”

Neither Cullen nor Breslin had much affiliation with the sport before beginning the capstone. But they bonded through their Irish roots, with Breslin being first-generation Irish and Cullen having Irish family history. They were driven by a desire to give back to a community and support a rising sport in their own country before heading in opposite directions to pursue their sport management careers.

The capstone is meant to serve as a semesterlong program where Breslin and Cullen work in three different parts. The first was on-campus outreach, involving sending emails and online content creation at SU’s National Veterans Resource Center on campus until late February. Then, they took flight to Ireland for a month.

Initially, Cullen wasn’t confident in his background in the sport. But after returning to culminate the capstone in April with final outreach to parents and schools for summer programs, his queries disappeared.

“I did realize I wanted to do something in Syracuse (for my capstone),” Cullen said. “It’s my last semester in college. I wanted to spend it with my friends here. Hypothetically, I could do the work in my apartment.”

Even though the office life in Ireland seemed intense, Cullen took a step back and realized nobody had it better than him, living his life with his new friend, Breslin.

When Cullen and Breslin returned to campus in late March, the results poured in. A youth camp played at the JMA Wireless Dome as part of the residential program last July. The club rugby teams on campus have received more opportunities to immerse themselves in the sport by traveling to Ireland.

“If there was any month to go to Ireland, it would be the month Sean and I went,” Breslin said.

Published on April 28, 2026 at 10:00 pm
Contact Jason: jaglick@syr.edu | @jason_glick