CU Club Rugby Causing a Ruckus

This past Sunday, the Metropolitan New York Rugby Union Collegiate Rugby Championship was hosted by Vassar in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., just 90 miles north of Manhattan. The chance to represent the Metropolitan New York conference in the regional playoffs was on the line, but for anyone familiar with the game, the clear favorite seemed to be the United States Merchant Marine Academy rugby team.
Its opponent, the Columbia University Rugby Football Club, had been playing well all season—some of the best rugby to be played for Alma Mater—but with graduation of notable seniors, this year’s squad was deemed too young and too small to compete with the Kings Point club.

However, the intense competition and fierce play showed the teams to be evenly matched. With less than two minutes remaining and USMMA holding a slim lead, a loose ball inside the Merchant Marines’ 22-meter line was swiped up by Columbia and taken in for the try.

If rugby types in the area had underestimated the Columbia squad, they knew better once the clock ticked off its final moments and pronounced the 30-22 victory for Columbia. A new Metropolitan New York Rugby Conference Collegiate Rugby champion had been crowned and, for the first time since the team nearly folded in 1995, the Old Blue squad from Columbia reigned.

It is not the end for Columbia this season—the team faces SUNY Brockport this weekend in the regional quarterfinals—but the upset on Sunday is a high watermark in the team’s recent memory. The past two seasons have done more for the future of the program than, perhaps, the past two decades.

“It’s definitely exciting. You can feel it in the team right now,” senior co-captain Tony Vongdara said. “At practices, everyone’s hyped up, everyone’s excited about the games. It’s just getting more and more exciting.”

Vongdara’s time with the team has coincided with significant developments in Columbia rugby. He arrived at Columbia last year from the University of Puget Sound in Washington to complete his 3+2 college program and continued to play the sport he picked up just a couple of years before. At first, Vongdara says he was struck by the dedication and discipline that pervaded the team’s ranks, and it is that level of seriousness that has been one of the reasons why there has been little impetus for the club sport’s elevation to varsity status.

Vongdara also noticed an Old Blue “brotherhood,” as he called it, which connected the current roster with alumni of teams past. It was clear in his first season that Columbia rugby made a unique impact on those who wore its colors.

Last spring break, the team traveled to Trinidad for six matches worth of international competition. Not only did the break bring greater status and surprising results, a 3-3 split, but the team had achieved a new sense of unity.

“Going to Trinidad definitely helped us out a lot in terms of defense and building that team camaraderie ... You could definitely tell there was a difference,” Vongdara said. “We were a lot more fit, because we were playing in 90-degree weather, practicing every morning, playing a game later that day.”

The trip inflated the collective ego of the rugby players and sharpened their skills against some of the best rugby players Columbia has had to face. In spite of the graduations and roster changes, the essential drive remained to propel the team through the NY Metropolitan Championship this season without a loss.

In the same week Columbia thumped Vassar 46-7 to secure a spot in the NY Met final, its would-be opponent slaughtered Hofstra 105-10. The United States Merchant Marines were ranked 21st in the country going into Sunday’s match, and Columbia gave them all they could handle. In conjunction with the success on the Caribbean stage last spring, Old Blue has affirmed that this is indeed a new era.

With the recent promotion of squash to varsity status, the question arises of whether the time is approaching for rugby’s promotion. But Vongdara says there is not much call for it, at least from the rugby players themselves. Few schools have made that investment in their rugby clubs, and at least at Columbia, there isn’t the need. Just one visit to the team’s evening practice on South Lawn shows that determination shines brightly with Columbia rugby, even in the dark.

“We meet at the sundial at 7:45 and practice usually goes until 10:30, 11—depends on when they turn the lights out on us.” Vongdara said. “We learn from every game what we need to do, what we can improve on. We just go to practice the following Tuesday and reevaluate how we played.”