At first glance, it looks almost too simple — or barbaric — to be a sport.
Two burly men stand at opposite ends of a narrow lane. One clutches a rugby ball against his chest while the other crouches slightly, waiting. A voice rings out: "Runner ready? Defender ready?" A countdown begins to the final cue. “Run it!”
Both athletes explode forward and collide into each other at full speed like two freight trains meeting head-on. The violent impact lasts only a second before momentum sends them stumbling backward. A crowd of spectators cheer and wince.
Sometimes the competitors ricochet off each other and regain their footing. Other times, one powers straight through the hit, or they both crash to the ground. And occasionally, someone goes down hard enough that medical staff has to step in.
What may look like a stunt for clicks is actually an Australian-founded competition league with a name, a rulebook, and a growing global footprint. In just 12 months, RUNIT, the self-dubbed “Home of Collisions,” has evolved from park trials in Melbourne into a world tour of arena events with formal officiating, six weight divisions, and prize money reaching $200,000. The league has already staged events across Australia, New Zealand, and Dubai, along with a series of U.S. trial stops on the West Coast in late 2025, including Southern California, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Seattle, and Austin.
The idea draws from a one-on-one tackle game which originated in the backyards of Australia and New Zealand, specifically amongst Pacific Islander communities, and is often called “run it straight.”
“If you’re playing rugby and someone does something you don’t like, maybe they hit you late or tackle you high, you call them out and tell them to ‘run it straight,” co-founder Virgil Taua’a tells Complex. “It’s almost like a game within the game.”
Taua’a, his brothers Brendan, Brandon and Noel, and their friends Stephen and Darren Hancock and Rennie Molimau saw an opportunity to turn a game they had grown up playing into something structured and scalable.
Since its inception, RUNIT has been a viral sensation, for better or worse. Clips of the collisions circulate across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, drawing tens of millions of eyes towards this concept, along with comments calling it the “CTE games” or “the most stupid and dangerous sport ever,” and prompting questions like, “should this even be allowed to exist?”
Nevertheless, both the league and their athletes are growing in popularity — current No. 1 athlete in the league, Semi Osa, has an audience of roughly 81K followers while RUNIT has close to 1 million across platforms.
“People haven't really seen something like it,” Taua’a admits when addressing the league’s immediate polarity and virality. “It's not really normal…Plus, nowadays attention span is not the same. People get that dopamine hit of seeing the collision [immediately] rather than watching 80 minutes of people running around and seeing one collision.”
The sport is designed to be clippable. RUNIT works off a simple setup, with one runner, one tackler, and a 20-by-4 meter lane separating them. One athlete carries the ball and runs directly at a defender, who sprints toward them from the opposite end. There’s no sidestepping or dodging, the expectation is a full, straight-on collision.
After each round, the players switch roles, and then the judges decide who came out on top, evaluating factors like who controlled the contact, who maintained forward momentum, and who absorbed or delivered the hit more effectively.
Before trials, a team of doctors screen the athletes to assess factors like previous injuries, prior head knocks or concussions, mobility, and overall “fitness to compete,” as co-founder Molimau puts it. The top performers in trials — typically former or current rugby players, wrestlers, and even American football players — are then issued jerseys and taken through a group warm-up led by a high-performance coach.
“A lot of things have happened before they even get into that arena,” Taua’a says. “We understand human error can happen in collision sports. That’s why we put safety measures around it to prevent that as much as possible.”
Yet despite these precautions, the medical reality of RUNIT tells a different story.
When asked about the risks associated with the sport, Dr. Alex Gometz, concussion specialist and founder of Concussion Management of New York, says the issue lies in the fact that, “concussions aren’t necessarily starting from a hit [to the head].”
He explains further: “A concussion is not an anatomical injury where things are swollen or bleeding. A shaking of the brain is what causes what we call an ‘energy crisis,’ or neural metabolic dysfunction. The concussion is not an anatomical injury where things are swollen or bleeding. A violent shaking of the head caused by hitting your shoulder, your chest, or your back can cause that same issue.”
The league calls itself the “world’s fastest growing sport,” and it's easy to see why. The founders started out by organizing trials around Melbourne, where rugby players and curious athletes showed up — sometimes to local public parks — to test themselves in the lane.
Given it was a new sport, they recruited players through word of mouth in order to build the league’s pool. “A lot of guys came down to try it,” Taua’a says. “Some even flew in from interstate just to compete.”
The events stream on Kick, a livestreaming platform where creators like Adin Ross, N3on, and Clavicular broadcast in real time while viewers watch, comment, and send money.
Launched in 2022, Kick has grown quickly by offering streamers higher revenue splits and fewer content restrictions than more established platforms like Twitch. That model has made it an appealing alternative for personalities who have faced bans elsewhere — Ross was banned by Twitch in 2023 for not deleting multiple racist and antisemitic comments in his chat. Kick has also drawn scrutiny and even investigations over the kind of — often obscene — content that appears on the platform.
Many of RUNIT’s events have also been backed by Stake, a cryptocurrency-based online casino and sportsbook where users place bets using digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Stake, too, is controversial. In October 2025, a proposed class-action lawsuit accused Stake — along with Grammy-winner Drake and streamer Ross — of promoting what plaintiffs described as a deceptive online gambling system through social media marketing.
When we asked RUNIT’s founders about their partners, Tua’a told us, “Stake is quite big now…they are probably the leading in their industry. So we were quite lucky to have been partnered with Stake for our previous events.”
As for Kick, “we’re not sponsored or partnered with [them], but for a mutually beneficial relationship, we utilize Kick because of their relationship with Stake.”
Kick and Stake were co-founded by the same group and operate under the same parent company, Easygo, all of which are Australian-founded.
“We are in talks with various new sponsorships and partnerships,” he made clear. “In terms of broadcast, what I can say is our next live event will be broadcasted on across US cable TV in 40 million homes in the US.”
He later followed that up with, “that’s currently under talks as well.”
As quickly as RUNIT is growing, so are questions about what, exactly, the league is asking its athletes to do, and its viewers to watch.
“I don’t think there’s a lot wrong with coming up with a different idea of a sport,” says Dr. Gometz. “But picking the most violent aspect of another sport and replicating it into a new one? That’s very concerning.”
Rugby authorities have distanced themselves from the trend — New Zealand Rugby publicly stated that it has "no association" with RUNIT or similar events and believes they carry a "significant risk of serious injury." Even New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon urged people not to participate in the tackling game, calling it a "dumb thing to do."
His warning came after a 19-year-old New Zealand man, Ryan Satterthwaite, died from a head injury while playing "run it straight" with friends back in May, 2025. It is not clear if they were inspired directly by the league, but according to the police statement at the time, the game was “based on a social-media-driven trend where participants compete in full-contact collisions without protective gear.” The young man walked away from the hit before suddenly feeling unwell, then later died in the hospital from brain swelling.
RUNIT’s official rulebook does have a list of safety measures and guidelines to protect their athletes from tragedies like Satterthwaite’s.
Tackles above the shoulders and below the waist are banned, and defenders must engage the runner from the front while using their arms rather than leading with a shoulder. Techniques such as head-first contact, shoulder charges, or lifting an opponent off the ground are also prohibited.
“We don’t enjoy the knockouts part of it,” Taua’a tells Complex. “We understand that it can happen and it’s part of the game, but our priority is to mitigate that, because we want to build the sport out so that it’s as safe as possible.”
Yet, “there is very little [the league] can do when the sport is about hitting really hard,” Dr. Gometz says.
“The danger of not only injuries but fractures and hematomas is very high. You can mitigate somewhat through training, like building a stronger system and body and maintaining brain health so it’s more resilient. But again, I don’t recommend anyone hitting others.”
