On a recent afternoon, the Wayne State College women’s club team practiced right along with the men in a meadow on the north edge of campus.
They locked arms and heads and otherwise contorted themselves in scrums. Women big and small held car tires as they ran laps, all the better for building strength and conditioning.
No passers-by seemed to blink.
Women make up the fastest-growing segment of rugby players in the United States. With youth programs still in their infancy and rugby becoming an Olympic sport in 2016, the future of the sport in this country depends on club teams like the one here at this 3,600-student university in northeast Nebraska.
The women migrated from sports like basketball, volleyball and softball. Given the chance to play the sport from which American football spawned, they gush about the rush they get from “blowing up” an opponent and the pride with which they wear their bumps and bruises.
Jennifer Becker bragged about the time two years ago that she broke her nose trying to tackle a University of Michigan player.
“She turned a different way, and I nailed my nose into the side of her face,” Becker, a senior from Madison, Neb., said. “But I kept playing. They wiped up the blood, plugged up my nose a little bit and I went on.
“I had to show those people from Michigan that we weren’t quitters.”
Such bravado does not seem to surprise the coach of the women’s national team, Kathy Flores.
“Women have always wanted to be physical, but they haven’t had the opportunity,” she said.
That is changing. USA Rugby, the sport’s governing body in the United States, has recorded a large increase in registered female players since 1999, to 20,430 from 6,104.
Officials say they expect that number to continue growing with rugby’s return to the Olympics in 2016 for the first time since 1924. There will be competition for both sexes, but in a seven-on-seven format rather than the traditional 15-to-a-side game.
The N.C.A.A. gave women’s rugby emerging sport status in 2002, allowing Division I programs to award as many as 12 scholarships. So far, Eastern Illinois is the only university to start a program, but its athletic department finances the equivalent of less than one scholarship divided among 20 players. There are about 400 college club teams, with some offering scholarships.
The United States will play in the Women’s Rugby World Cup in England in August. The Americans finished fifth in 2006. Flores said the United States was considered a “sleeping giant” because of the nation’s wealth of athletes.
Whitney Nielsen, a senior from Sioux City, Iowa, was a member of the Wayne State softball team for less than a week as a freshman before she quit to take up rugby.
“I had never played a contact sport before, and it was so much fun,” Nielsen said.
Nielsen received a mixed reaction from her family.
“My grandma was terrified for me. My dad thought it was awesome. You watch volleyball and softball, and then you watch a tackling sport,” she said, adding. “He was like, ‘Yeah, my daughter is going to kick butt.’ ”
According to rugby lore, the physicality of the game breeds mutual respect among the players.
“Yeah, it’s kind of a violent sport,” Nielsen said. “But in the end, we walk off the field and we’re ladies and gentlemen and say please and thank you and all that stuff.”
Florida International University WOMEN NEED COACH
