BY HANNAH PURKEY

Online | Published March 15, 2011

Now that we have reached the end of the second week of practicing the team got together for a classroom session to explain to us rookies how the game of rugby is actually played. Considering that I haven’t even seen a game played before, this was a necessary practice. For example, did you know that there are three different ways to score points in rugby? I sure didn’t.

To go along with the lesson, the captains showed some rugby videos they thought would be inspirational. However when you have to explain after multiple clips that we don’t usually get that bloody at our level of play, inspirational might not be the best word for it. Terrifying might be more appropriate. But that’s OK.

The lesson also featured live demonstrations of what a scrum looks like. Well, what our half of the scrum looks like. Considering our lack of personnel, a table filled in as the opposing half of the scrum. The team was pretty confident that if this had been a real match, they would have been able to take the table, but it did it’s best to provide some resistance. A scrum is pretty much a huge tangle of body parts that forms on top of the ball after someone has been tackled, with each side trying to push the other far enough away to gain possession in a kind of reverse tug-a-war.

If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. When done right, the players in the scrum are so interlocked with one another they function as a unit. Thus trying to show us the individual parts of said unit was a little difficult and featured many, “if you stand on the table with your head tilted to the left and focus on the green t-shirt, that’s the tighthead prop position.”

But we still somehow got the idea. At first it was a little frustrating to be thrown into practices without knowing anything about the game. But if this classroom session proved anything it’s that rugby is a sport best learned by doing. And maybe that it’s a good idea to wait a few weeks to show your rookies the blood-soaked result of a well played game of rugby.

« RETURN TO FRONT PAGE

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »