Yellow Jackets and Beer Mugs

"You can't drink out of yellow jackets," wing forward Bill Looney said, following the Harvard Rugby team's receipt of beer mugs with their Ivy League title, one week after the ruggers received jackets for their win in the Eastern College Championship.

In the past two weeks, the ruggers have surpassed the achievements of any previous Crimson squad in the hundred-odd-year history of the sport at Harvard. For the nine ruggers who started on the team four years ago and who helped win the Eastern Championships, this year's accomplishments have been beyond their wildest dreams.

In the fall of 1977, the team had difficulty getting a field from the athletic department: the following spring, the team played half its season without proper goalposts. Then, a top-four national ranking was unthinkable.

According to senior Keith Oberg. "Our ten-day trip to England our sophomore year really turned the program around." There, the ruggers were thrashed three times and learned that the game was more than hard-tackling and individual runs.

Shortly after the team captured their recent Ivy League crown, forward captain Al Halliday commented. "It's a great feeling to have done it for Keith." He added that without two-year captain Oberg's "coaching, inspirational and motivational skills, we would probably still be a bunch of individuals trying to play a team game."

Significant Share

As members of a club sport, the players themselves have been responsible for the turnaround in rugby at Harvard. The Athletic Department supplies the team with a field and money to purchase balls, but the club must coach itself, buy its own uniforms, and pay for traveling expenses.

Although expenses associated with rugby often strain the budgets of some players, moves to limit the club's independence and achieve varsity status have met with strong opposition in recent years. When Oberg convinced Welshman Kevin O'Brien to help coach the team last fall, a number of ruggers at first thought that he would ruin the spirit of the club.

To almost all the players, rugby is much more than a game. Beer and somewhat off-color songs after Thursday practices are as much an institution as line-outs and scrum-downs. Roy Roberts, president of the club, is relieved to be temporarily finished with tournaments so he can enjoy the company of his teammates.

The combination of competition and off-the-field fun may give rugby a flavor which is unique among Harvard sports. Fighteen consecutive wins are all the more satisfying with victories over teams such as Army, which had seven coaches, and Navy, which required its players to run five-and-a-half minute miles before they could play rugby.

For Halliday, "the warmth exuded on the trip back from Virginia matched the crying elation after our victory in the Easterns." The next day his biggest concern was that players other than those on the first team felt they too were an integral part of the club.

Steven J. Rosston '81 is a member of the Harvard Rugby Team as well as an editor of the Crimson.