An alumni's reflection on AUWRFC

Of all the things spring 2020 stole—a peaceful spring break, presenting at my first research conference, getting to bond with my literature professors, bagpipes at graduation—the cancellation of my final rugby season hurt the most.

I felt particularly cheated because I was on the brink of an exhausting recovery from a snapped ankle. The break happened 10 minutes into the first championship game we had qualified for in my entire tenure on AUWRFC. An orthopedist later informed me that the disastrous “spiral fracture” which twisted my fibula and needed eight surgical pins and a metal plate to stabilize, had resulted from my own refusal to leave the playing field until my ankle buckled beneath my limping weight. I had no choice but to leave the field and call in a sub, officially ejecting myself from the day’s roster, per US Rugby regulations. Still, I insisted on hobbling off the field myself, cracking jokes with the medic who insisted I set off to the hospital straight away. When the pain got the best of my fronted bravery, I hopped to the car one legged with one hand on a rookies shoulder and another clutching my cell phone, explaining the upcoming insurance bill to my parents. I would love to say that my swift departure to the nearest emergency room rallied the team to win the game. However, we lost miserably, double-digit points to one or two meager tries.

Even upon kickoff, the game had already established itself as nothing short of a nightmare. Our team was nervous and disjointed. Admittedly, I myself had spent the morning wandering around colonial Williamsburg with a couple teammates: “good craic,” as Ross would put it, but certainly not the most productive or advisable pre-game warmup. Let alone the added pressure of the championship weekend, afternoon games were never our team’s strong suit. The first ten minutes were a testament to this. A sloppy defensive line and missed vital on-field communication let through a breakaway try that left us even more dejected and uncertain than we started. Strategically, I knew the team would suffer from my absence, as a senior player. But, all that ran through my tackle-rattled brain, as I step-hopped to the sideline, was the sting of treason, my own abandonment of duty, to the team and players that had come to define my personhood.

For better or for worse, a lifetime of sportsmanship honed by four years or women's rugby had completely corrupted my survival instincts. The painful injury was one thing: an excuse to for another extension on the essay I’d been putting off and an opportunity to try opiates for the first time (fun, but not worth the constipation). But, to this day, I have yet to quantify, in any known language or incoherent cries, the needling heartbreak of that final crumpled step, when I fell to the turf and realized my playing time was finished. My tenure on AUWRFC, along with a quick sojourn on the Scottish team while studying abroad in Edinburgh, had managed to destroy the finely-tuned reflexes of several millennia of human evolution. Rugby, by definition, rebels against biology. Why would any sane person commit their health, sanity, and entire social circle to an animalistic sport that bruises and breaks, concusses and cripples? Why did I feel a bone-deep compulsion to play through my pain?

Rugby players proudly tout our fondess for punishment. Beast of the East merchandise tent is awash with this evidence; the slogan “give blood, play rugby” litters the merchandise tent, blaring from t-shirts and bumper stickers. Each year, the AU team shirt bore one of this rotating array of slogans; my very. first team shirt, bright red with white lettering, proclaimed “Fifteen as One” across the shoulder blades. These words are more than slogan, more than pledge, more than identity to the players that don these shirts, stick these stickers, or copy down Instagram captions below powerful still shots of gameplay. We are not fifteen athletes, we are not simply a team. AUWRFC is one physical body, oozing communal blood.

The mysterious force we’ve christened “Rugby” selected a gaggle of strong, smart, self-sufficient, and crazy college students and shoved us into holy matrimony. A rugby team is a nervous system; it is lungs, muscle, veins, and skeleton. Rugby is more intimate than family, more devastating than romance. Leaving the field with my career-ending injury, I did not feel the grief of losing a limb. I had become the dismembered limb itself, dooming my own body to bleed from the fissure I’d created.

My freshman year, I chose a sport that will slam you to your face and leave you begging for more, will spit salt in your would and cackle at your screams. It will inflict the same upon the fourteen players that line up beside you at kickoff, and the score of your subs that scream on the sideline. The whistle blows, and you become nothing but eyes and hoarse voice, running legs and outstretched hands. For eighty minutes, you abandon individuality and become one-of-fifteen, a fragment of a whole: the most glorious, liberating, powerful, humbling sensation I have ever had the pleasure of participating in.

When a lull in covid restrictions granted me the chance to jet down to DC and reclaim some leftover shards of my shattered final semester, I visited the Triangle, an unassuming patch of metropolitan grass that had monopolized my evenings and weekends since freshman year. Free, for once, from clumsy cleats and bashing bodies, the once sad, barren terrain had flourished, with dandelions and buttercups. Finally fully bipedal, buoyant from commencement and a bottle of celebratory champagne, I took one last cheeky run to the tree and back, tracing the oh-so-familiar path of Coach Ross’s preferred punishment. I kicked up yellow pollen and splattered black mud up the back of my royal blue graduation robe. I victoriously slapped the trunk of the tree and sprinted way back, towards the familiar boundary of Van Ness St and the Presbyterian church across the way. Countless times, I had scampered this same race, flanked by the forwards’ panting breaths and swears, staring ahead at those speedy little backs who took the sprint sets at a light jog and still managed to beat us all. Running alone, clad in my graduation cap and gown, I fell flat on my face.

Mags Class of 2019