BY HANNAH PURKEY

Online | Published March 16, 2011

Now that I had a better idea about the actual rules of rugby, I am able to start piecing together the different exercises we have been working on at practice into a general idea about how a game of rugby precedes. The best way I have to describe it is organized chaos, pretty much what you would expect from a sport that combines aspects of soccer, football and mud wrestling.

We still spend a lot of practice trying to get down the basics of passing and tackling (which for most is review and for me is a sad attempt at locating my hand-eye coordination). But each practice the exercises get folded into more and more game-like scenarios. So pretty much as practice goes on I get more and more confused about where I should be on the field and what exactly I should be doing there.

A lot of the time during scrimmages I will be running along, minding my own business, when suddenly a big pile of bodies begins to form right in front of me. Am I supposed to join in? I just don’t know. Being the Swattie that I am, this is usually when I start making a pros and cons list in my head.

Pro 1: Maybe I could help… that’s a pretty big maybe.
Pro 2: I’ve always wondered what the mosh pit at a concert was like, and that’s pretty much what the scrum looks like to the untrained eye (a.k.a. my eye)
Pro 3: Maybe people would think I actually know what I’m doing (which should be clear from this list that I don’t)
Con 1: That’s a really big tangle of body parts, and I really like having all of my extremities attached to the rest of my body

By the end of my lists, the pros usually outweigh the cons. Of course, by the time I’ve come to this conclusion, the scrum is already breaking up, and often someone mistakes me for a productive member of the team and throws me the ball.

My reaction to this is always the same. You know in roadrunner cartoons (yes, this is another reference to the Sunday morning cartoons of my youth, deal with it), when the coyote thinks he’s finally going to get the roadrunner, but he realizes that instead of holding the trigger he actually is holding the bomb? Yeah, that’s usually my reaction when I get the ball, except instead of being blown up like the coyote, I get tackled by a whole bunch of people.

So clearly my contribution to this team is not going to be in the scrum. But that’s ok, because as we learned last week, there are several ways to score points in rugby that I might be better suited for. But one way that we never really talk about or practice is drop-kick goals, when you drop and kick the ball through the uprights during the regular play of the game. When I asked why we hadn’t practiced this at all, there was a general consensus that nobody really does it in our league. This was perfect! Something I could learn to do and actually be a productive member of the team. So with the help of our assistant coach Laurie and a few teammates, I set out to learn how to drop kick.

Laurie, however, quickly informed me of why nobody in our league attempts this: it’s really, really hard. And I was only starting to learn fifteen years after most rugby players do, so she was sure I would quickly catch up. This might have been sarcasm, but I decided to take it as a vote of confidence and forged ahead with the lesson.

What resulted was a good workout… for the teammate collecting the balls for me. It turns out that although punting a non-round rugby ball is difficult, the task gets exponentially harder if you first have to let the ball bounce off the ground before kicking it. I now know how Charlie Brown felt, but there was no Lucy to blame in this situation, just the laws of physics working against me. You think this would discourage me, but it hasn’t. I won’t let a fifteen-year lack of experience and the laws of physics impede me from scoring at least once this season by drop kicking. The real trick will be to find a way to do this without losing possession so many times that my teammates beg me to stop trying, or try to kill me if I don’t. That’s something worth thinking about.

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