About Time to Give Rugby a Try

I stayed on campus during this weekend’s break, and so I was able to do something that I always enjoy. I went up to Baker Field to watch a sport that I had never seen before. On Saturday at the Columbia Soccer Stadium, I watched the Columbia University Rugby Football Club take on the rugby club from SUNY-Brockport in the Northeast Rugby Union playoffs.

Going into the game, I understood the two teams’ stats and records, as well as the general idea of the game, but none of its intricacies. I knew it was like football in the fact that each team was trying to get the ball to the others team’s end zone—which in rugby is called the try zone. The only other thing I knew was that my roommate is on the Columbia team and the guy from SUNY-Brockport that played his position was a 28-year old man from Australia. My roommate and the guys from the Columbia team seemed to be surprised, but not overly worried about that fact, so I didn’t think it was too uncommon.

So with my trek to Baker on Saturday morning, I was relatively excited to expand my sports horizons and learn a few things about the sport that my dad used to play in college and that my roommate spends hours a week practicing. However, I was ill prepared for what I saw.

Soon after the game started, I realized that what I had known was pretty much nothing. I tried to figure out the rules about going out of bounds and when a scrum occurs, but to no avail, because to me, the common spectator, no patterns emerged out of the game. All I knew was that if the ball went out of bounds, the kicking team usually got it back, but not always, and that scrums happen at random times for no apparent reason.

A friend of mine watching the game with me told me that her brother had played rugby, so she sent him a text message and asked him when scrums were supposed to happen, and his reply only confirmed what we already knew—“too complicated.”

At that point, I knew trying to figure out the rules would be futile, so I just tried to pay attention to strategy, making note of what did and did not work. Almost everything Brockport did worked, as they seemed to pass very well and they held the ball on the Columbia side of the field for most of the game. Columbia, however, was not kicking very much to move the ball up field and wasn’t able to consistently break off long runs while simultaneously keeping control of the ball.

Columbia was able to take what I was told was a 5-4 lead early in the game, however, Brockport poured it on after that, eventually winning, 51-5. It was a tough result, but as a spectator, it was fairly enjoyable watching some pretty big dudes lay some hard hits on each other, especially since no one received any lasting injuries. The most lasting memory I think I’ll have from the game was a hit by Columbia senior and rugby captain Kern Collymore as he absolutely leveled one of the players from Brockport, and in the process of being thrown, collided with the Brockport ball carrier, who fell to the ground with him. That’s the kind of thing football fans love to see, and I thought it was even cooler to see it happen amongst guys who weren’t wearing any pads.

So at this point, I have watched one rugby match and I still don’t understand many things about the sport, like why a 28-year old Australian is eligible, how the out of bounds rules work, or when a scrum is supposed to happen. Will that stop me from going to another game if I have the chance? Of course not. Part of being a sports fan is being open to new sports, because if you love one, you’d probably enjoy many others. As Columbia students, we generally hear about the “big” sports like football and basketball, but there are many others out there to discover. You don’t have to know the rules or intricacies to appreciate the game, you just have to appreciate the players, the hard work they put in, and the competition between the teams because when it comes down to it, all sports share those elements, and that’s what makes them so captivating.