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| I am man, hear me roar! (Penn Rugby) |
Penn Rugby gets the short end of the stick.
For much of this semester, they’ve been training on a grassless, gravel-smitten and ravaged pitch, littered with trash, completely untended by the Penn Athletics Dept. Last week a player landed on the sharp end of a discarded earring.
Rugby is not mentioned on the Penn Athletics website. Add that to the fact that players are forced to train on a substandard and dangerous playing surface, it would seem rugby at Penn is as good as ignored by the Athletics Dept. This is unacceptable.
The Penn Men’s Rugby Football Club is recognized as the oldest collegiate rugby team in America. It is first documented as being in existence in 1910 and was training and playing competitive games on a regular basis pre-WWI. The club has continued to grow over the past century. There are now two teams who train three times a week and compete in the Ivy League Tournament every spring as well as featuring in regular games throughout the year.
The Penn Athletic Department claims to be “dedicated to providing a wide array of athletic opportunities on both the intercollegiate and recreational levels which will enhance and enrich the educational experience of our students” and yet can’t find any space on the website for the Rugby Club nor a field in its vast campus for them to play on.
Rugby is a major world sport The International Rugby Board has 95 full member countries, including global heavyweights such as England, France, Ireland, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The sport continues to grow with countries such as Italy and Argentina joining the ranks of major actors. The US and Canada both have national teams, though you wouldn’t know it for the lack of media coverage.
The demand for facilities is there. The money to provide them surely is. Penn Athletics needs to address this immediately.
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February 26th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I’m not sure that the demand really is there. Besides the club teams, I don’t think that any students play rugby recreationally. The athletics department doesn’t have an unlimited budget, so I’m not sure they should be spending too much on a facility that benefits maybe a couple dozen students. And nor should they be spending the money just because it is a “major world sport.” And it’s not Penn’s responsibility to promote sports that are unpopular here. If so few students here participate in it, it’s not worth the money, no matter how popular it is elsewhere.
General maintenance of playing fields should be a priority, so I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be a space at all. But it’s not practical to create and maintain a dedicated rugby field. Plenty of teams play on fields also used for something else. Can’t the rugby teams reserve Franklin Field three times a week?
One other comment: There is no reason for rugby to be on official Athletics Department website. That website is solely for varsity sports, which rugby is not. There is a separate site, run by the recreation side of the department, that should have it listed. But a non-varsity sport does not belong on the main athletics website.
February 26th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Follow-up to my previous post: Here’s a link to the Club Sports page. http://www.upenn.edu/recreation/clubs/clubpages.htm
All club sports are listed there, while all varsity sports are on pennathletics.com. There’s no reason to make an exception for one club sport.
February 26th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
The rugby team can’t reserve franklin field in the manner that a varsity club does. We play our games in Fairmount park, miles from campus. We practice on Hill and Bower, splitting time with every other club sport, which is why Hill and Bower are reduced to nothing but dirt and mud every semester. I assure you, the club soccer team and ultimate frisbee teams would love to hear that Rugby was getting its own field. Princeton, mind you, has plans for a $1 million stadium for Rugby, and Dartmouth has a $3 million rugby complex. Rugby is America’s number one college sport based on participant numbers. There is also a girls team which has been quite successful recently who faces the same problems, and a very well respected grad student team based out of Wharton. All told, over 120 students play rugby, which I am willing to bet means we’re Penn’s most popular sport, club or varsity.
February 27th, 2007 at 11:45 am
“Senior” you are ignorant. You have no frame of reference. You are like a child that walks into the middle of a movie. How would you have any knowledge of the demand of the rugby team if you weren’t on it? Four years ago the team was allowed to practice and host matches on Bower Field behind Franklin Field and the Palestra. Now the team has trouble reserving any time on Bower Field for practice and hasn’t had a game there in three years. The team forced to find space anywhere it can in order to practice.
Benham way to prance around in that picture.
February 27th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Alumnus, you are correct that I don’t know everything about the ability of the Rugby team to reserve fields. I’m sorry about the team’s difficulties, but I maintain that a dedicated rugby space is not practical. More general field space, with better maintenance, is the best solution. That way, participants in any sport can use it, and it would not be dedicated to a niche sport that nobody outside those 120 students can use. By the way, 120 students is far from the “most popular sport.” Varsity football alone (sprint included) exceeds that. Varsity and JV baseball, combined with all of the intramural teams, undoubtedly exceeds that. The amount of students that recreationally play soccer surely exceeds that. Again, I do think that a solution that satisfies the rugby teams can be found. But the rugby teams are no more deserving of dedicated space than any other club team.
February 27th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Varsity and JV Baseball have their fields that they don’t share with other teams. And your math on football is off.
Intramurals here are fairly sad, and they, unlike Penn Rugby, don’t play varsity squads, let alone other colleges.
By having ‘open field space’ you get a quick tragedy of the commons. Please look at the Hill mud and stone pits, or HRN field. By the by, next time you see 50 guys running around HRN playing a sport you know nothing about, it’s rugby.
February 27th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Club Rugby is the highest level of collegiate rugby available in the nation. There is no Varsity NCCA. So how can you deny the athletes who compete at the highest level they can in America the basic necessity of decent field space.
November 3rd, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Hello webmaster…I Googled for brad garrett pictures, but found your page about or at least a field…and have to say thanks. nice read.