Club Spotlight: Caltech Rugby Club

I’ve always said that playing rugby in America is like being a humanities student at Caltech (we’d know, our interim club Treasurer is an Economist). Caltech has always been a bastion of sporting prowess out on the west coast but times-are-a-changin. Kevin Gilmartin, VP and Faculty Dean of Students, recently slid into our Outlook DMs to announce a pivot “away from sporting extracurriculars [in] the application process.” Concerned that our sporting heritage might fall to the wayside, a diverse group of Caltech students has set about to avert this crisis and provide a new outlet for those seeking twinned excellence in both body and mind.

Enter Caltech Rugby Club - actively recruiting anyone who can put ‘Caltech Athletics South Field’ into Google Maps at 6:30pm on Wednesdays. Whatever your experience with the egg-shaped game, whether an undergraduate, Professor or everything in between, get yourself down pitchside, run-off some academic steam, and in the meantime read-on while I convince you all that it will be worth your while!

And so what is this rugby I speak of, beyond the ‘relatively violent’ game once alluded to by Taylor Swift? Allow me to cast your mind back to 1845. While one rather large Texas was being admitted to an ever-enlarging United States of America, one rather small school called Rugby, in the slightly larger town of Rugby, on the marginally larger Island of Britain, stood on the cusp of history. A revolution was occurring across the playing fields of England. Fed up with simply being confined to the 2D plane, innovative football players (emphasis on the foot) were beginning to pick up the spherical ball and enjoy running with said ball in their hands. It was at that small school, only a few miles down the road from my hometown, that a group of students laid the foundations for the hallowed laws of rugby-football. Since then, the sport has grown in both complexity and popularity, yet the core axiom still remains: thou shall not pass the ball forward. While you the player is permitted to do just about anything else in open play, one must contend with a series of exotic and immensely intimate group jenga exercises, as soon as a player is tackled or the ball is dropped. Rucks, mauls, scrums and lineouts are the less glamorous side to our game but the ability to thrive in the ‘dark arts’ of these grappling contests will earn you the richest respect from your teammates.

Now how this maelstrom fits into the form of a competitive game depends on which version of rugby you happen to be playing. The direct descendant of our quaint 1845 game is known today as Rugby Union, a 15-a-side, 80-minute game, equipped with all the contact trimmings. Rugby League is Union’s little brother, with two less players, and is mandatory viewing for anyone with a Manucian accent from the north of England. Moving to the wider Rugby family, some may try to pull up a chair for Australian Rules Football to this mostly harmonious Christmas lunch, but for a game remarkably akin to Quidditch played by Kangaroos, I think we can discount it for now. Rugby 7s is the hip and modern iteration of the game, with 7 players per team and two, electric 7-minute halves. The purist might dismiss Rugby 7s as pandering to a generation cursed with attention-span deficits. And yet, riding off the back of the glorious Parisian Summer Olympics, Rugby 7s has become a brilliant window into our sport. We see this no less than here in the United States, where Women’s Team-USA captain, Ilona Maher, has become an internet sensation, boasting an Olympic Bronze Model and the title of most followed rugby IG account, all in a single summer. Anything more?

All three codes of rugby - Union, League and 7s - simply ask you to score more points than the opposition team, either through means of touching the ball down at the end of the pitch - earning a try - or to kick the ball over the twinned upright posts - a *penalty kick, conversion *or *drop goal, depending on context. *The astute amongst you might notice similarities with another egg-shaped ball game that shall not be named. The illegitimate child of our beautiful 1845 game has achieved supreme popularity out here but in my lowly opinion, to play rugby is a more arresting experience. While some sports favour specialisms and narrow skill sets, rugby asks the intricacies of both offence and defence to each player. There’s no hiding behind the helmet or the safety of your cannon fodder up front. Physical mismatches are sought and exploited. Just ask 170lb Chrysander Botha staring down a rampaging 265lb Tendai ‘The Beast’ Mtawarira, ready for a full-frontal tackle, with nothing but the pride of a nation as his shield. As my former coach, Danny Rawlins, once wisely mused, ‘rugby is a game of piano pushers and piano players’, but at the end of the day they’re all still dancing to the same keys.

Here at Caltech it’s time to face the music. Existential threats seem to be the tunes of our age: dust-bowl pitches at the Athletics Centre due to inability to water the grass; ever-skyrocketing Sapporo pitcher prices at Aikan Sushi restaurant; Pasadena-based hydrogen fuel-cell solutions struggling to get off the ground because ‘Gas is just too goddamn cheap’. At Caltech Rugby Club, we make it our mission to tackle these issues, and many others, head on. We have a rich Alumni network, quick to advise on the PhD-to-hedge-fund-pipeline, 101 ways to injure your hamstrings, and even fence-scaling enterprises. They reminisce on the Halcyon days of Caltech rugby, and while the torch must pass, they remain our North star (and LinkedIn connects).

Caltech Rugby Club remains in its infancy, but as a new season dawns, now is the time to dive into a sport you’ve learned so much about over the last five minutes or so. For now, we are running weekly touch rugby sessions, every Wednesday at 6:30pm down on the Caltech Sports field. So even if you’ve decided to leave your contact days behind you, Caltech Rugby is still a great place to keep learning your trade and probably the only place on the planet where you can be guaranteed to play rugby without a chance encounter with the rain. And yet Caltech Rugby is so much more than just a disproportionately large number of French students tossing a ball around - we work hard to plan an active social calendar, with group expeditions to play other LA-based teams, watch international fixtures and do our part to support local business here in Pasadena.

To conclude where we started, Dr. Kevin Gilmartin - ironically enough a Professor of 19th century English literature - leads our university ever further from our sporting destiny. And yet, any seasoned Techer will tell you that it is often what you do off the field of research that can best facilitate your performance on it. 6:30 Wednesdays, be there or be square oval-shaped.