---

BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published February 17, 2011

I love sports. Anyone who has ever met me, or has read this column before, can attest to that. In fact, I may love sports to an extent many would consider bad for my health, not to mention my GPA. While most people celebrated February 14 as Valentine’s Day, I celebrated the day that pitchers and catchers began reporting for spring training. Of course, this mindset has lead to some odd situations. Like the acquaintance who casually asks after my team, eliciting a very long monologue on the Sharks current position in the Western Conference, when in retrospect he was probably just asking after the Swathmore soccer team. However, I have never been ashamed to show my devotion to sports. Scarcely has anyone walked into my room without being taken aback by the homage to Giants and Sharks players that decorate my walls. And, perhaps one too many times, a friend has suggested I seek professional help after hearing me have a conversation with the bobble-head of my favorite pitcher that holds a prominent place on my bookshelf (don’t worry, the conversations are always one sided).

As much as I love sports, I understand how difficult it can be to get involved in them if you didn’t grow up with them. I myself did not grow up with parents that were big sports fans. While they tuned in for the Super Bowl and the U.S. Open, sports were never a priority in my household. Perhaps this makes it odd that I grew up to become such an obsessive fan, but it also attests to the fact that even if you don’t have a background in sports you can still grow to like them.

But what if you want to be more than just a fan? However confusing it might be to watch a sport you have never followed before, it must be even more daunting to try and actually play one. But sports are too much fun to spend your life only on the sidelines. Although I have already played sports in my life, I wanted to understand how hard it really is to learn a new sport in order to be able to back up my claims that sports are worth the struggle of having to learn how to play them. So, I have joined the women’s rugby team.

While I may be an athlete, I am the last person that you would expect to find on a rugby pitch: I am 5’1” on a good day and the only thing I know about the sport I learned from Matt Damon in “Invictus.” If you need further proof of my inadequacy for this particular sport, when I told some teammates from the soccer team that I had decided to play rugby, they proceeded to laugh for about ten minutes right there in front of me, and then ran off to give the rest of the team a good chuckle. But if I really intend on convincing you that anyone can play any sport if they really want to, then the more ill suited I am for the sport, the better.

The Two Rules of Rugby

After checking in with the team to make sure they wouldn’t mind having me tag along, which I should mention they have been incredibly nice about, I decided I should try to learn a bit more about the sport before my first practice, just in case Hollywood hadn’t accurately depicted it. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I googled it. The first search result was for Ralph Lauren’s rugby clothing line. I was hoping more for “rugby for dummies,” but no such luck.

From what I could gather from Wikipedia and some YouTube clips, I realized some important things about rugby. First, rugby names are so much better than in any other sport. Forget offense and defense, rugby positions have names like hooker and tighthead and loosehead props, not to mention things like scrums and mauls. I have no idea what any of these things actually are, but they certainly sound fun. The other thing I learned was that I really needed to double-check my health insurance before starting to play. With one too many images of dislocated shoulders in my head, I set off to my first practice.

Although there were a few of us rookies who were clueless about what was going on, we were all immediately thrown into drills. This was confusing but necessary, since it was a bit cold out and standing around to explain the rules of the game just didn’t seem worthwhile.

Somewhere between realizing I have no hand-eye coordination and making a sad attempt to kick a rugby ball as if it were, you know, round, one of the girls found a moment to explain that there are only two important rules in rugby. The first is not to pass the ball forward; the second is not to get caught breaking any of the other rules, which are really more like suggestions anyways. So maybe I wouldn’t be as clueless as I thought — even I can handle a sport with only two rules.

There were plenty of hilarious moments at this first practice for anyone who happened to be walking by the field. The highlight of the first practice, however, was my first lesson in tackling. Referred to by many on the team as a convenient outlet for the frustrations of life, tackling is a necessity for every position in rugby.

Thus I gave it the old college try, and I assure you it is not as easy as it looks. Following the much-touted “cheek-to-cheek” method (the cheek on your face to the cheek on a much different body part of your opponent), I became familiar with the rugby team real fast. I have to give credit to my fellow teammate during this drill, who somehow managed to fight the urge to pat me on the head and say “nice try” as I made a series of sad attempts to tackle her.

Unfortunately, all we were able to do at this point was lift, or attempt to lift on my part, our opponents since we lacked the necessary mouth guards to fully tackle. But then again, that’s just another reason to look forward to the next practice.

Continue to follow my adventures on the pitch on The Phoenix’s website.

---

« RETURN TO SPORTS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »