Sports
Rugger Mothers
The muddy, bloody, glorious origins of rugby at Radcliffe
I was a hooker at Harvard. It wasn’t what I expected from college, but I fell in with a crowd of foul-mouthed girls who spent Saturdays brawling and trying to score. In September 2002, I joined the Radcliffe Rugby Football Club, playing prop, flanker, and finally, hooker—the player who taps the ball to her team’s side of the scrum. It was an opportunity I owed to the 1982 Radcliffe team.
This year, Radcliffe rugby celebrates its silver anniversary, which encouraged me to look up some of its founding mothers. The idea was actually conceived on the sidelines of a men’s game in 1981. “I got frustrated that women couldn’t play, because it looked like such a fun game,” says Ingrid Jacobson Pinter ’83. “I was moaning on the sidelines to a friend, and he said, ‘Since when did you take no for an answer?’”
The friend was tutor Paul Erickson, Ph.D. ’84, a graduate student in English and a rugby player. Jacobson Pinter, soon to be Radcliffe Rugby’s first president, drafted Erickson as faculty sponsor and then postered the campus with flyers promising free beer to interested athletes. Louy Meacham ’85 recalls, “Word was out on the street that they were looking for people who had one or two screws loose.” Meacham says they drew “people who were a little off the beaten track, but with an incredibly fierce competitive instinct.” Merry Ann Moore ’84 recalls, “People were interested in women’s athletics, and stretching the limits of what women’s athletics meant.” Funded in part by Radcliffe and eager not to be seen as (in Jacobson Pinter’s words) the “Ladies Auxiliary of the men’s team,” they wore Radcliffe red and black.
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Radcliffe ruggers mixing it up in the early 1980s
Most had never touched a rugby ball. Mindy Fener of the local Beantown club became the coach and assigned positions, designating a “pack” of contact-hungry forwards and a “line” of speedy, evasive backs. In rugby, forwards attempt to win possession by forming a “ruck” and driving opponents off the ball, or by securing the ball in a knot of players called a “maul.” The “scrumhalf” directs traffic in the pack and sends the ball out to the back line. The backs then try to gain territory by “skipping” the ball out wide, “crashing” back inside, changing direction with switches, and faking their defenders with dummy passes. It is often said that the forwards decide who wins, while the backs decide by how much.
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