About Us
Rugby in the United States has talent at every level, and the information about it is spread across many places, recorded unevenly, or not recorded at all. OpenSide Rugby is building the shared record the game is missing, so players, coaches, clubs and national programs can see who is playing, how they are playing, and where they could go next.
One record per player
Results, appearances and minutes from youth, college, club, pro and international rugby, brought together into one consistent record for each player.
Credit for the whole team
Numbers that show the work forwards do, not only the points scored by backs and kickers.
Data clubs can capture
TouchLine Tagging, so a club can record its own matches from the sideline and see what happened.
Evaluation that travels
Tools and reports that help players get seen, and help programs find and develop them.
OpenSide Rugby is in early preview, starting with club rugby in the Northern Super Region (women's and men's) and the Atlantic, Gulf Coast and Pacific Super Regions (women's), and is being built alongside the people who use it. Feedback from every page shapes what comes next.
Margaret “Zim” Zimmer
Founder
Bleeding black and gold for the Pittsburgh Forge (USA Rugby Women's Club, D1/D2) since 2025. My rugby journey started in 2017 with Beantown in the Women's Premier League (WPL), with a brief but wonderful spring with the Austin Valkyries in 2023 along the way.
Before rugby, I played NCAA Division I ice hockey at UConn, where I put up respectable-enough stats before becoming a bust at the pro level as the Boston Blades' 6th-round pick in the 2016 CWHL draft. (In my defense, I was working 50+ hours a week in the lab while playing, had no money, and neither the team nor the league had athletic training or S&C staff readily/regularly available... women's pro sports have AMAZINGLY come a long way since 2016, eh???)
During my time in Harvard's Biological & Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. program, I realized I didn't want to write grant proposals for a living, so I (naturally...) moved into the MLB front office world. I've spent the last 4+ years in player evaluation, bridging old-school scouting and new-school analytics, while doing my best to soak in how friggen cool it is to chase World Series rings and work in pro sports for a living:
- Boston Red Sox (2022–2024), Pro Scouting: covering the 7,000+ minor league and big league players signed to the 30 MLB organizations, and contributing to free agency and trade discussions.
- Pittsburgh Pirates (2025 season), Scouting Operations Specialist: Domestic Amateur (aka the Draft) and International Amateur (aka the Wild West) scouting.
- Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL; summer 2026), scouting consultant: helping the league prepare for its expansion draft and free agency period.
I don't just scout or pitch signing and trade ideas, though. In a front office role, going out to scout is only about 10% of the job, and player acquisition work maybe 30%. The rest includes a whole lot of logistics and operations, plus the behind-the-scenes work that keeps all of it moving. Before a team brings in a player, due diligence can mean anything from a social media check, to figuring out who in the org knows the player's high school coach's son well enough to ask about their makeup, to getting the hitting or pitching staff's best guess at how much the team could improve that player's bat path or command. (Less Moneyball, more group project.) Then all of it, from scouting reports and stats to model outputs, has to land in one place, matched to the right player, in time for the meeting where the decision gets made.
That last part is where the coding comes in. Scouting and analytics often get talked about like rival camps, but in practice they're two halves of the same conversation, and someone has to connect them. So despite “scouting” being in every title I've held, a lot of my work has been helping to build the data pipelines, models, and tools that MLB and PWHL front office and scouting staff rely on to make informed, timely player acquisition decisions. Along the way, I learned a lot more coding and data management skills than I ever expected to.
Now it's rugby's turn!! Player information in our sport is scattered across competition platforms, club websites, team socials, and whoever kept the scorebook that day. Pulling it into one place, matched to the right player, is the same work I've been doing in baseball and hockey, just for another sport that's given me so much, and one whose players, coaches, and fans have had far less access to comprehensive stats. With OpenSide Rugby and TouchLine Tagging, I hope to serve the rugby community with one central, easy-to-use platform that helps all of us (players, coaches and beyond) feel more connected and better informed as we continue to grow this wonderful game.