BY HANNAH PURKEY

Online | Published March 17, 2011

If you watch a football game on television, inevitably the camera will show a close-up of the coach talking into a headset while hiding his face behind the team’s playbook that he’s been clutching onto all game. This always seemed strange to me. First of all, you are hiding the play you are calling behind a sheet with all of your plays on them to, what; make sure the other team isn’t reading your lips? I think if the opposing coach pulled out a pair of binoculars and trained them at the other sideline, the referee might notice. Maybe other people have better eyesight than I do, but even the idea of the coach calling a play from the sideline is strange to me. While we have strategies that our coaches develop in soccer, they don’t map out our every move we make on the field, except for set stoppages of play. And even then it is more of a suggestion than a commandment.

But as I discovered today, rugby uses set plays just like football. Except rugby plays seem to be much more flexible and are called by the people on the field actually playing, not those on the sideline (more like point guards calling plays in basketball than coaches calling them in football). So while the forwards went off to practice scrumming (which as previously mentioned, I am not well suited for), the backs went off to learn the seven plays that we will use this season and that are the title of this post.

On the off chance that an opponent stumbles onto this blog, I will refrain from going into the dirty details of our strategy (cue sigh of relief from the captains). But suffice it to say, running plays all practice featured a lot of sprinting from point A to B, then turning around and sprinting back. It was a bit tiring, but with every play the chaos (ironically the name of one of our plays) that is rugby became a bit clearer to me.

There really is no better time for the sport to start making sense since the countdown to our first game began today; we have five more practices before playing the University of Pennsylvania on March 26th. Mark your calendars; it’s going to be LEGEN, wait for it, DARY!

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