A Rough, Yet Personal, Sport

For the first time since the seniors of the current Radcliffe Rugby Football Club walked onto the team, the tight-knit group of roughly 25 women might end the season on a triumphal cadence.

Once a team floundering at the bottom of their division, Radcliffe Rugby finished the fall regular season undefeated. Now in the playoffs, only two games stand between the recently reinvigorated team and a spot at nationals in the spring.

What is underlying this comeback is not only amped up recruitment and placement in a new division, but also a close community capable of overcoming both team tragedy and past defeat. Perhaps the best representation of this community—bound by a sport that is rough yet highly personal—is what team members call a unifying facet of the game: rugby songs.

“They’re basically really vulgar songs,” Amy J. Uber ’10-11 says. “I’m trying to think of a clean one.”

A SPORT UNLIKE ANY OTHER

There was a rainstorm the day before Radcliffe rugby’s first round play-off game early last week against Boston College. The intramural fields behind Harvard stadium were so sloppy that even in cleats, the players kept slipping through the muck. These are terrible conditions to play in, Uber—who broke her fibula in an early season game—comments from the sidelines, but it makes the game cinematic.

“It is a rough sport,” Uber says, “we like to show off our bruises.”Just as the sport’s songs remain largely unknown to the average American spectator, so too do the general rules of rugby.

“It seems like a really brute game but really it requires a lot of intelligence and strategy,” Margaret G. “Meg” McCarty ’12 says as she watches her team run through a drill during a Wednesday morning practice a few days after the BC game.

It’s raining, and the players—who aren’t wearing any protective gear except mouth guards—appear to converge on the large, egg-shaped ball and collapse into a heap.The play resumes, and the women continue to shout colorful jargon at each other. “During the game rugby has so much more communication than any other sport because it’s so complicated,” Captain Anna M. Ruman ’10 says. “You have to constantly, constantly be talking,” the team’s other captain, Rachelle M. Calixte ’10 chimes in. “I almost always lose my voice after a game.”

A “breakdown,” they explain, occurs when a player with the ball is tackled to the ground. A “ruck” occurs when players from both teams fight for the ball after a tackle. The ball can travel down the field, they explain, by being kicked or carried, but not thrown forward. If the ball goes out of bounds, it is returned to play in a “line-out.” During a line-out both teams form pods around a player and guide her into the air, helping her try to catch the ball. For a moment, this near lift resembles a cheerleading move.

“It’s sort of like a jump ball on steroids,” says Jennifer O. Middleton ’10, the club’s president.  After each game, the players explain, it’s time to party—with the other team.

I DON’T WANNA BE A HOUSEWIFE

“We bring a grill and we barbecue after the game,” says Uber, who is one of the team’s social chairs. “And we go back to someone’s dorm room and basically we drink and sing songs.”

It is a rugby tradition for opposing teams to socialize after the game, and rugby songs are a staple of any post-game get-together.

Most teams know the words to the choruses, and verses often incorporate players’ names and positions. “They generally all have to do with drinking or something like that,” Uber says, trying to pick one she could sing for The Crimson.

“I like ‘House Wife,’” Ruman says. “The lyrics are a little edgy,” Calixte adds, “but that’s a song everyone knows.”

“You sing about how you don’t want to be a housewife, you don’t want to scrub his floors, you don’t want to give him babies,” Ruman says, summarizing the song’s content.

“And then because that’s kind of heteronormative, we also have a song ‘I Don’t Wanna Be a Straight Girl.’”

Uber acknowledges the stereotype that a lot of female rugby players are lesbians. “Our team kind of makes a joke of it,” she says. “You have to accept that if you play rugby you play because you love the sport.”

Nicole K. Poteat ’11, who is the team’s alumnae relations officer and Uber’s roommate, says she wasn’t even aware of the stereotype when she joined the team. “It’s completely not an advertising point or a selling point for us,” Poteat said.

“The nice thing about it is that it does mean we have a very, very open community,” she says, contrasting her experience with other teams where locker room chatter revolved around guys. “Conversations are gender-neutral,” she says. Poteat points out that the majority of Radcliffe’s current team is straight, adding, “No matter what the make up of the team is sexuality-wise, it still maintains that very open community.”

A TEAM’S TRAGEDY

The team drew even closer last May after the sudden death of Kathlene S.G. Joo ’11.

After falling silent for a minute, Middleton explains, “The rugby team to a lot of us is a family and when you lose someone in your family you rally around them.”

Uber, who was one of Joo’s roommates, says the team was together shortly before Joo died. Uber had to tell the rest of the team the next day.

“Within a matter of days we managed to rent vans and get hotels and drive to Pittsburgh for her funeral,” she says.

“Instead of addressing it directly, it’s more that we’ve come together a lot,” says Poteat, who was also one of Joo’s roommates. Ruman and Calixte say it was a difficult period to be captains, but time and a summer away has helped a lot.

“I’m sure some people think of the fall season as being for Kathlene,” Ruman says.Uber says she agrees, “A lot of people do when they put on a Radcliffe jersey have her in mind.”

Though it is still too soon to drop her name into conversation, Uber says the team has found ways to commemorate Joo.

“We just celebrated her 21st birthday,” Uber said, “We wore her favorite type of clothing and drank her favorite type of beer.”

“I think it’s very evident when you join that this group of people is very strong,” Poteat added.

WE JUST PLAY FOR RECREATION

At Harvard, rugby is a club sport, but that doesn’t mean team members take it lightly. The team practices at least three times a week, sometimes with a fourth optional practice run by the captains, and most players also train on their own.

In Division I, the team constantly faced tough competition, and since the beginning of this year has played in Division II.

Because it is a club sport, the team is responsible for everything from arranging fields and transportation to drawing up starting line-ups to hiring coaches.

Head coach Bryan Hamlin hails from the rugby heartland, New Zealand. After he stopped playing himself, he said he wanted to “give back” to the sport. Assistant coach Shannon Wallace plays for the Beantown women’s club team in Boston. “This season we’ve done a really great job of bringing up our level of play,” Wallace says. “Usually when you come back from the off-season you have to reteach.”

But this year, she says, “We didn’t have to start from scratch.”

After practice last Wednesday, the team finally sang a rugby song for The Crimson.

Calixte says she likes their chosen song, “Fifteen Fit Señoritas,” because of its lyrics.

“We don’t play for admiration, we don’t play for victory, we just play for recreation,” the team sings.