Sport: Guam rugby climbs to highest ever world ranking

Guam has risen to its highest ever position in the World Rugby test rankings, following their victory in the Asian Division Three East tournament.

The US territory has climbed three place to 69th in the world, just three places below Pacific neighbours Papua New Guinea.

The "Flying Proas" defeated Brunei and China last week before losing to a Philippines Residents side 35-22 in Manila, in what was the team's third match in five days.

Coach Tony Penn said 11 players made their international debut over the past week and he wants to keep growing the playing depth on island.

"They're so keen and what-not but they've only got a population of 160,000, but funnily enough it's one of the most popular sports in the high school system," he said.

"As you know it's an American territory so they're pretty much dominated by American sports: basketball, baseball and American football and also soccer is pretty big up there but rugby is really really popular amongst the school system over there.

"The problem they've got when they leave school (is) they all bugger off to colleges in the mainland in America or they just join up to the military so they lose that transition phase from school rugby to senior rugby is pretty much non-existent.

"They don't have a club rugby scene per se, they have a tournament once a year, a tens tournament, and they have an alumni series, which is playing for their old schools, and they probably play like three games a year so they really box well above their weight for a country that doesn't have a senior rugby competition."

The former Hurricanes prop retired from representative rugby in 2010 and admits he didn't know Guam existed when a former coach of his, New Zealand Maori selector Willie Hetaraka, asked him to assist with coaching the men's national team.

"I'd never even heard of Guam and didn't even know where it was. I thought yeah I'd go up and anyway one thing led to another and he sort of chucked it in and they asked me to stay on and that's was coming up now for about six years so that's how we ended up in Guam," he said.

"But I just love giving back to the game and especially to a bunch of guys who are so keen and are acutally passionate about the game and wanting to learn. It's really satisfying actually and it's just real grassroots rugby at it's best, I couldn't describe it any other way.

"I usually come to Guam about a week or two weeks before we go away, get the guys off the beaches and try and rustle a team together and we work pretty hard for a week or two and then we go away to the tournament and back I go."

Penn is based in England but said he planned to spend more time on Guam in an effort to develop the local game.

"I'm going to look at going down a little bit more often and running some coaching clinics for the coaches and just up-skilling the people as much as we can," he said.

"It's an American sports dominated territory so as much as they're really keen they're limited to volunteers. There's a few ex-pats up here that have got the game going on the island - actually set rugby up 15-20 years ago.

"They do a lot of work but they can only do so much so just trying to develop the game even more and trying to get the high school kids to keep continuing playing at a senior level so that's work in progress so we're looking at doing that moving forward.