Did you ever see the movie “Remember The Titans”? If not you clearly hate America, Denzel Washington, and heartfelt sports movies and you owe to yourself to buy the special edition DVD immediately. Anyways, about halfway into the movie, the black and white players on the movie’s Virginia high school football team resolve their differences and hold a team meeting. In this meeting, they design a dance-step pre-game warm-up routine that they shake and shimmy through for the rest of their season.

What this got me thinking about was pre-game rituals. If sports have always been the entrée of competition, then the pre-game rituals have been the appetizers: the palette quenching prequels that get fans and players alike amped for a game. It is the final stage before battle, where players from Pop Warner to the Pros transform from athletes to warriors on a mission of victory at all costs. Damn the torpedoes.

Pre-game rituals can be minuscule yet complex. Witness Nomar Garciaparra’s hand-twitching, glove-adjusting maneuver before every single major league at bat he ever had. They can be maniacal, as in Ray Lewis’s incredible hulk imitation in the gate before running on to the field for Ravens games. They can be subtle and nostalgic, like the Notre Dame football tradition of patting the “Play Like A Champion Today” sign in their locker room on the way out to the field before home games. Or they can be rowdy and unifying, like the Jesus Shuttlesworth led ’roll call’ in Spike Lee’s “He Got Game.” They can also be incredibly corny, individual, choreographed, or spontaneous (too many examples here). But their ultimate effect is to instill a level of focus and tenacity in players and excitement in fans that otherwise would be sorely missed on any field, court, pool, or pitch.

One sport that doesn’t get any recognition for its elaborated, historical, and all together terrifying pre-game rituals is rugby. Now I’m a rugby player myself, so pardon a certain level of bias, but the sport has long been dormant in the eyes of media and fans. This is due to the scattered regions of the globe where it is played and its lack of national spotlight in the United States. Rugby is, however, beyond legitimate as a sport. It deserves the reputation it has as ’football without pads,’ though the rules will make you do a 180-degree spin. I won’t go into a defense of the sport, because I could write on a book on that. For now I’ll focus on the rituals.

The roots of rugby pre-game rituals go back thousands of years. While the first game is said to have taken place in 1823, the rituals reflect the cultural heritage of the countries that play and as such are dated much farther back in history. The greatest example of this history is The Haka. Simply type this two-word phrase into YouTube and be prepared to shit yourself. The Haka is a traditional Maori war cry that itself was derived from ancient Greek war rituals. A fierce, yet cooperative call and response, the Haka involves an entire rugby team standing a semi-circle or triangle facing the opposing team immediately before a match begins. A leader in the center of the formation yells out a call and the whole team responds with another call and a slap of their thighs. The calls and movements gain momentum and pitch until the entire stadium is ringing with the stomping and shouting of the Haka. If you doubt me, then watch it. It will blow your mind. Today, the Haka is preformed by several professional rugby teams, most notably New Zealand’s All-Blacks. The dance received ESPN coverage this past season through the success of Colt Brennan and the University of Hawaii football team, who’ve done the Haka during warm-ups for years.

As a club sport, college rugby teams don’t get to use their school’s stadiums or practice fields. But drive to the further reaches of our university’s playing fields — long lane to be exact – before a rugby match and you will see pre-game rituals that challenge Ray Lewis in the maniacal department, rival “Remember The Titans” for choreography and are more intimidating than asking a girl to MORP (prom backwards) in seventh grade.

While not all as crisp as the Haka, every team and I mean every team has a ritual that is traditionally preformed seconds before the match starts. Just before the starters take the pitch, the entire team gathers in a tight nucleus and a number of things can happen. Sometimes, as is the case with Eastern Connecticut’s team, a booming howl is heard from the center of the huddle and the team breaks into its own hard to decipher yet deafening call and response. A team could also burst out of the huddle in a planned step while hollering their own song. Wesleyan’s Old Methodist Rugby Football Club has one man in the center of a human-to-human circle-chain. His name is Ben Nissim. This man rolls around the inner circle slowly gathering speed and everyone starts to yell. He then rejoins the circle and the team break into a Rockettes-like line dance that ends with a verbal abuse of the other team as we stand only feet away from them. Wes Rugby is credited for this ritual, which Old Methodist borrowed from them.

I’ve been involved in a variety of sports over the years and a variety of pre-game rituals. None of them have been as vicious, politically incorrect, in your face, or as pure an adrenaline rush as the rugby pre-game ritual. Short of a battle-royal between both teams before the actual game, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything that comes close. I encourage everyone to go watch our schools’ rugby team (we honestly have two teams, no joke) at the very least to see these dances. Once you finally watch “Remember The Titans” you can laugh at how that Disney-engineered football pre-game warm-up pales in comparison to a rugby ritual.