From the Sidelines: Expect the unexpected in women's rugby

By Laurie Randell

How much do you know about club sports? Varsity sports are usually what a Yalie reads about in the newspapers or talks about in casual conversation on the street. I am no exception; I occasionally flip through the back pages of the Herald to see how Saybrook is doing in the Tyng Cup standings. Unless I happen to know someone playing a particular club sport, however, I won't read about how well the ultimate or sailing teams are doing.

One club sport I know well, however, is women's rugby, a team I joined this September at the beginning of my freshman year. So far this season, our record is 4-1, and we've already clinched first-place in New England and homefield advantage in the Northeastern Regional Championships. We will be a force to reckon with in the weeks to come.

From my first day on the rugby squad, I was struck by the uniform lack of experience of the rookies. Most freshmen joining ultimate have at least tossed a Frisbee sometime prior to entering Yale. Newcomers to the water polo team already know how to swim (hopefully) and are not scared by the idea of treading water. No one, however, plays rugby before college, unless they come from a country that gives the sport more attention and respect than the United States ever has.

I had never played rugby--or even seen it played--before I got to Yale and had absolutely no idea of the rules. Joining the rugby team was a spur-of-the-moment decision for me. One of my roommates received a flyer for the team at the Freshman Bazaar and came back and told us about it. The rest is history--before we knew it, our entire suite had signed up to play. We're fondly known as "the rugby suite" of Wright Hall. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

I turned to veteran ruggers like our co-captains, Teresa Sakash, MC '99, and Holly Martin, PC '00, to teach me the basics. As they were teaching new players the fundamentals, our leaders also had to work on honingthe skills of their returning players. While I was learning that a forward pass is always illegal, veter-ans were working on tightening up their scrums and bridging over the ball during a ruck.

Rugby is not an easy game to understand or to play. For the first few days of practice, I was in a state of utter confusion. What exactly was a ruck and why did it involve intentionally dropping to the ground? I had thought that the objective of most sports was to stay on your feet. The entire game confused me. Rugby looks deceptively like football, but has many elements of soccer. The game is continuous and brutal. We wear neither pads nor helmets. Have I mentioned how much metal cleats hurt when they crush your hands?

Playing rugby is an intense experience. During the course of an 80-minute game (consisting of two 40-minute halves), we get tackled, thrown to the ground, and involved in brutal mauls grabbing for an elusive ball. I spend much of my time bound onto other forwards in a scrum, pushing against eight other women who want the ball just as badly as I do.

Why exactly would I want to do this to my body? Most girls leave high school having played nothing more violent than powder puff hockey. I played softball, about as non-contact a sport as you can get. It shocked me to walk onto the pitch and see a tackling drill in progress, with two women running at each other at full speed and taking each other to the ground. It is even more exciting to be participating in one of these drills. Rugby is a marvelous way to release some tension and pent-up aggression. There is an innate satisfaction that comes after a hard practice of being thrown around. I have returned from practices covered in mud and grass, so utterly disgusting that I was sure Commons would not let me or any of my teammates in for dinner.

Who would have thought that a little 5'2" girl from suburban Connecticut would be playing rugby? It's quite amusing to watch people's jaws drop when they hear of my hobby. It was rather hard to explain to my mother the fact that I am called a hooker--meaning I hook the ball in a scrum. The looks on her face while watching one of my games for the first time were priceless. Hopefully, she will get used to the fact that I'm playing rugby. The playoffs are just around the corner, and if all goes well, I'll be playing for a long time to come.

Photo by Julia Tiernan.

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