Many people consider American football to be a barbaric sport. I can’t imagine why. The players wear full pads, there are rules designed to protect the quarterbacks and kickers, and there’s an infraction for “unnecessary roughness.” You’ll have to excuse rugby players if they roll their eyes at the notion that football is the only brutal sport played on this campus.

The Gophers men’s rugby team has been around since 1968. It is a club sport, so the team receives little attention despite the fact that they are one of the better squads in the nation and just finished an undefeated regular season. Rugby, a sport that originated in London in the 19th century, is played with an oblong ball that looks somewhat like a football with rounded ends. Players move the ball up and down the field by passing, kicking and running with it. It is a full-contact sport with no pads, and these boys do not play nice.

“It’s physical,” chuckles head coach Loren Lemke. He goes on to note, however, that there are numerous rules (or “laws,” as he calls them) in place that actually make rugby a relatively safe sport in comparison with hockey or football. Players must wrap when they tackle, there is no blocking allowed, and defenders are not allowed to hit from behind.

Players on the men’s rugby team come from various athletic backgrounds. According to Coach Lemke, about half of the team’s members played rugby in high school, while many others played football or wrestled. A few had virtually no experience playing contact sports. “We have a kid who played tennis, and a couple track athletes. They just wanted to try something different,” Lemke says.

Fourth-year player and team president Jimmy Hanson says he prefers rugby to other sports because it requires players to be well-rounded rather than specializing in one aspect.

“Everybody on the team has to be able to do everything,” Hanson says. “It’s not like football where you’ve got one guy who blocks on every play, or one guy who throws the ball on every play. Everybody has got to be able to make a tackle, to make a pass, to communicate, everything.”

Lemke says that the program is building steam and has improved tremendously during his five years as coach. “When I took over we weren’t even the best Division II team in the state,” he says. “Now we’re a Top 20 team in the nation.”

“It’s very competitive and we’ve built a culture of winning,” says Lemke, who coaches the team on a voluntary basis. Perhaps one newly hired football coach on campus should take note while attempting to transform his own program into a winner.