Many athletes will tell you that mental focus is the key to a strong performance. For a rugby player, however, the aggression is the best part.
“The game of rugby is nine-tenths in your head,” said Nora Connor ’07. “If you can look at an opponent running at you full speed and think of nothing more glorifying than driving your shoulder into her thigh and sending her flying off her feet in pure humiliation; if you can dupe an opponent by faking a pass like you would with a dog and a tennis ball, then rugby is for you.”
At the very least, rugby is for the fearless.
“In my opinion, it is the most physically demanding sport out there,” said quad-captain Molly Dengler ’06. “You must be strong, fast, and agile all at once, and the play does not stop when there’s a tackle—you’re expected to pop right back up time and time again, for the duration of two forty-minute halves. There are also so many rules and tactical considerations, that many players can play all though college without fully understanding the game or knowing all the rules!”
According to some, the rough and often dangerous nature of the sport helps to build team unity.
“You have to be a little crazy to play a sport like rugby,” Dengler said. “You spend 80 minutes beating the shit out of your opponent, then you socialize with them like you’re old friends.”
Many people on the team see themselves as part of a larger community of rugby players. According to Fitness Coordinator Maggie Starr ’06, who met other “ruggers” while studying abroad, the team has a tradition of socializing with opposing teams after games.
Starr joined her freshman year, in part because she had friends who were on the team. Ultimately, though, she stayed for the love of the sport.
“There is no other sport that lets me use my body this way,” Starr said. “I was one of those middle-schoolers who always fouled out in basketball, but in rugby, I get to use my body (almost) as aggressively as I want.”
The team, by all accounts, operates under a peculiar mixture of diplomacy and discipline. Like a varsity team, the rugby team practices six days a week.Before its spring training trip to the D.C. area, the team arranged for two local women’s club teams to each lead a practice.
Yet the team, the only one at Wesleyan to attain Division I status in the past six years, has no coach. Instead, the four captains take complete responsibility, planning practices, devising game strategies, and creating lineups. In addition to Dengler, the team is led by Aurora Maoz ’06, Caitlin Slattery ’06, and Lauren Williams ’06.
“Our team is run in such a way that is more encouraging than some other athletic experiences that are marked by a nasty coach barking orders,” Dengler said. “People rebel against performing for a coach and get a thrill out of playing for each other.”
One decision the team has made together is to change its status from DI to DII next fall. Although the team ultimately cherishes its egalitarian structure, it has found it difficult to compete against larger schools without a coach or the benefits of being classified as a varsity sport.
“Although our hearts were fighting to stay in DI, it just wasn’t realistic for us to perform at the same level as big schools that put more emphasis on athletics than Wes does,” Dengler said. “We were getting creamed by UMass and Yale and we weren’t playing our game.”
In addition to its democratic structure, the team has distinguished itself from other teams by garnering a reputation as the most queer and trans-inclusive on campus. It has become an institution of sorts within the larger queer community at Wesleyan.
In 2003, the team changed its name from “Women’s Rugby” to “Wesleyan Rugby” to better reflect its status as a trans-inclusive women’s team. According to the team’s gender policy, the team, still distinct from the “men’s” team under USA Rugby regulations, plays women’s teams but welcomes both transmen and transwomen. The writers of the statement are quick to clarify that they are not a gender-neutral team, that they “do not ignore gender identity, but rather celebrate multiple gender identities, and aim to create a space for those people traditionally excluded from playing in the ‘men’s’ division.”
“We do not assume *anyone’s* gender identity or pronoun preference,” reads the statement. “We respect and celebrate the multitude of gender identities that lie within the categories ”woman“ and ”trans,“ and remember that gender transgression is not the property of any one gender identity, expression, or category.”
The players, aware of the example they are setting, are proud of the community they have created.
“Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in sports without having to experience discrimination, questioning, or exclusion,” Connor said. “The team does a great job of educating its members about gender issues and making sure that we know where to go to ask questions or discuss our confusion about gender.”
“For me, it means rugby is too great a sport for the team to be anything less than welcoming to people who want to get out there and run, scrum, and tackle with us,” Starr said. “Plus, shouldn’t everything be trans-inclusive?”
According to Dengler, queer-inclusiveness is a tradition in rugby.
“It’s not just at Wes,” Dengler said. “The queers have run rampant in the rugby community forever and continue that trend even after college. I don’t know why that is, except that rugby breaks a lot of gender stereotypes, in terms of a contact sport for women where we play by the same rules as the men. We do make a special point to be queer-friendly, so queers are attracted. But we’re not all queer, as the common myth suggests.”
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