BY HANNAH PURKEY

Online | Published February 22, 2011

Learning something completely new is always a challenge and can be frustrating at first. But good things take time and are best approached in baby steps. At least that’s what my fortune cookie said last night. I never quite believed that something so tasty could also be a portent of the future, but this cookie was right on the money. As I learned in my second day as a rugby player, tackling is one such challenging skill—one that requires a multi-stage process to acquire.

Stage One: How to fall

Sure, you’ve been doing it since before you could walk, and I’m sure it still happens more times on a Saturday night than you probably want to admit, but there is an art to falling on the rugby pitch: the art of crumpling. And just like when multiplying matrices, order matters. A good crumple starts low and works its way up: knees, hips, and then shoulders (and if you happen to elbow the girl tackling on your way down, so be it). Once you hit the ground with the ball (hopefully) still in your arms, you “jackknife” your legs out and place the ball for one of your teammates to pick up. Easy, right?

Not so much. If you have a moment, try running into a solid object, falling to the ground in a particular order while still cradling a ball in your arms, and then position yourself correctly after you hit the ground. Then maybe you’ll have a better understanding of what I mean by the “art” of crumpling. Now I don’t want to brag or anything, but I think in my first few tries I really nailed it—that is, if the goal was to personify a sine wave as it was put through a shredder. Yes, this was definitely not one of my most graceful moments. Luckily, none of these stages required a high pass (or any kind of pass) to move onto the next stage.

Stage Two: How to get up

Once you’re on the ground, you need to know how to get back up. But this is not as easy as brushing yourself off and doing a quick 360 to make sure no one saw. Getting up from a tackle usually entails extricating yourself from a mass of body parts in a way that ensures you keep all of your own extremities still intact. The best way to learn this is by doing: grab a friend and have them lie across your back and try to impede you from standing up. It’s fun, I promise. The trick is to find a friend approximately the same size as you. When you are 5’1’’, however, it’s difficult to find friends that don’t have at least a couple inches on you. Thus, my teammate was able to throw me off her back like a dirty t-shirt, while I thought it best to, you know, wait a little while and then catch her by surprise. Yes, that strained look on my face and shaking arms were all part of my plan…

Stage three: Tackling 101

Once you can fall and get back up, you can learn to tackle. The particular type of tackling we were learning today, the wrapping technique, is all about momentum (read: if you are my size and tackling someone bigger than you, aka everybody, physics is pretty much your only hope). How to do it: as someone is charging at you at full speed, first resist the urge to turn and run in the other direction, then wrap them up in your arms and use their forward movement to pull them to the ground. No problem.

Important to note, however, is that rugby players don’t use the mannequin dolls you see scattered across football fields, but instead practice on each other. This, of course, is more game-like, but also hurts more. I never really considered before I hit the ground the first time that this meant being practiced on myself, not just practicing on others. Really, it just ensures that you know the next day when you have been to rugby practice. In fact, you know for the next couple of days.

Stage four: How to put it to use

Once we had gone through all the baby steps, it was time to put them to good use. Coach put us through a pretty simple offense v defense drill, but decided to put all of us rookies together on defense so we could practice our new skills. The result was what I have to imagine chickens look like the moment immediately following decapitation. I can’t really tell you what happened, because I’m still not quiet sure myself. There was a lot of yelling and pointing, and occasionally a teammate asking me to stop hugging them as they had already passed the ball to someone else. But somewhere in there was a good piece of advice from our assistant coach: “channel your inner anger.” At one point you have to stop worrying about hurting the friend standing on the other side of the line of scrimmage, or, more likely for me, hurting yourself while attempting to hurt the friend standing across from you, and just get angry. While this practice functioned mostly as a reminder that I still didn’t actually know where I was supposed to be on the pitch or what I was supposed to be doing there, at least I now have an outlet for all that confusion and frustration. That’s half the fun of sports, right there.

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