This is for the ‘We are Oberlin’ stories section of Oberlin’s website. I am finding it pretty ho hum and trite right now, but I’m working on it. It’s also around 1700 words, which is rather more than they would like. But it is, in a nutshell, the story of me at oberlin.
My story involves poor choices, cheap shots, bad smells, the underage consumption of alcohol, three concussions, and a broken nose. My story is muddy, bloody, and grass-stained.
My story is, of course, about rugby.
I came to Oberlin uninterested in sports. In high school I wrote for the literary magazine. I played euphonium in the band. Athletes and gym class were things to be avoided, hence I didn’t find the Oberlin Women’s Rugby Club until the fall of my sophomore year, when I met a junior I badly wanted to impress. She was a member of the rugby team and she casually joked one day that I should come to a practice. I clearly missed the joke, and I joined the team thinking I would show her how tough I was and simultaneously win her undying affection (I did quite a lot of things without much thinking).
I had no idea what I was getting into: when I walked onto the pitch for that first practice I was wearing cheap sneakers I bought the day before (I had never played a sport or done anything remotely athletic). Earlier that week I ran my first mile just to see if I could actually do it (I told myself that if I couldn’t, then I wouldn’t play rugby. I ran seven laps around the track in Phillips and collapsed, with tears of joy, near the water fountain– eleven and a half minutes after I started).
I barely made it through the warm-up run. During the three laps the team took around the pitch, I was sure that everyone was staring at me, and I struggled to keep up with the back of the pack and appear that I was not, in fact, dying. I knew I had no athletic ability to offer; this was clear to everyone else by the time we were done stretching.
The practice was cardio like I had never experienced it (the only cardio I had ever experienced was my one eleven and a half minute while four days prior). I spent the entire practice attempting to catch my breath and barely keeping up; I used my last ounces of energy to attempt to take in the rules of strategy of rugby. I was red-faced from exertion and embarrassment. I’d had this idea that because it was a sport I had never heard of that maybe I would be good at it. I wasn’t. It was awful.
The last five minutes of that practice were to be spent playing Know Your Field, a grueling set of sprints. I asked the captain if, it being my first practice and all, I had to run them.
She looked me up and down, raised one eyebrow and said “You don’t have to do anything” as she spat and jogged to the touch line with the rest of the team, leaving me alone on the sidelines. Everyone looked ragged, ready to get off the pitch and go eat dinner. It was almost sunset. They had homework. They needed to ice. They were tired. And yet, everyone was lined up together. Though everyone grumbled quietly when the coach announced the sprints, no one complained. Everyone was ready to run. To push harder, eke out one last run, and do it together. I realized I wanted to become one of them. I didn’t know if I had it in me.
I jogged over; no one looked at me. At the whistle, with everyone else, I ran the sprints. In my knock-off tennis shoes I ran them so hard I thought my lungs would burst inside my chest. I was so much further back than everyone else that the captain (after she finished her sprints) jogged out to where I was and ran the last couple of sprints by my side as the entire team stood at the end of the pitch, cheering me on. When I finally finished the last sprint and crawled over the line, she helped me stand up straight and catch my breath, and then she told me that I could come back on Wednesday. She told me I was tough and amazing. “You worked really hard today”, she said, “that was really great”.
I was a Rhino for three years. After years of dreading high school gym class and happily self-identifying as a geek, I threw myself into fitness. I worked out in Phillips every day, gaining strength and speed by long, wide strides. I wanted to be strong for rugby, for my team. I ran three times a week with a stopwatch to mark every milestone. When I ran a mile in ten minutes for the first time I stopped to recount laps to make sure I didn’t make a mistake. And then after a semester, a nine minute mile, eventually an eight, and finally in my third year, seven thirty, and then I started running 5k. I learned how to bench press, how to squat. I did push-ups every morning for four months because that was how long it took me to build up the strength to do a push-up pyramid (10, then 9, then 8 and so on; 55 total). I practiced footwork, running backwards, running entire laps of grapevines around the track.
It wasn’t like the Rocky movies, though: I was still the slowest Rhino. I was not a gifted athlete, and no amount of conditioning would ever compensate for that. I accepted it; by the end of my first season I could run the warm-up without wanting to throw up. That was accomplishment enough.
I struggled for three years to earn the respect of my teammates. While I was always welcomed at practice after that first day, I fought every day to not be the worst at every drill. I wanted to be better then ‘that girl we have to let play because we’re a club sport and everyone gets to play’, and I very slowly found my place as someone who was enthusiastic, who cheered very loudly, and who always had extra snacks on hand during away matches. I made my teammates laugh with the names I came up with for the plays I eventually got to call. I tried. I showed up. I was honest. As a junior I moved from the wing (a forgiving position for new players) to play hooker, a punishing position in the dead center of the scrum that required mental toughness and control. I discovered I had a body type that suited the position; I was never so proud of my butt. I was a captain my last semester. I made no effort to cover up the fact that most of the rookies had more skill than I did by the end of the season, but I loved the team, and I so badly wanted the chance to steward the organization that had given me so much.
Rugby was about building strength, stamina, and technical skill, but for me it was also very much about embracing my own shortcomings and failures, and learning to fit in as who I was instead of an ideal I would perpetually fall short of. In short, rugby gave me the tools and perspective to grow up and live my own life.
Rugby helped me deal with the stress that had been making me miserable; a constant worrier from birth, I remember the first few weeks walking home after practice realizing that I hadn’t worried about an upcoming test in the past three hours; the moments of mental quietude were novel and wonderful. Rugby ran me so hard that I stopped having the energy to deal with the existential crises that prior to joining gave me frequent nightmares.
Rugby gave my life at Oberlin a structure and goals that were meaningful and attainable and different from anything else I had ever done. I had so much to learn about athleticism and sports! I was excited to learn about positioning and the history of the game and how to watch a rugby match on tv.
I learned to love rugby for all of those reasons, and I learned how to love it in one hand and hold in the other the knowledge that I would never be more than a mediocre player. I learned how to rejoice and take pride in the fact that I learned from, honored my mistakes. I learned how to laugh at myself in ways that were honest and joyful. I learned how to love something that would never bring me any glory, that I could never be great at. Rugby taught me how to love and value myself as I was, and as a person who consistently tried her best. How could I not love it back?
Rugby helped me to turn myself into the person I was desperately afraid I might never become. Rugby gave me back the voice I had lost to adolescence and boyfriends in high school. I growled. In one of my first games I found myself breaking through a weak tackle, screaming “it’s MY ball” and throwing a girl off me. I learned all of the verses to the rugby songs we sang after each game; I made myself blush as I sang them. I had no idea who I was becoming, but I was loud, strong, and confident; I liked it.
Rugby gave me back a body I never knew existed. I learned my own strength. For the first time in my life I understood that my mind and body were two parts of the same whole, dependent upon each other for sustenance and mediation. I spent a lot of time looking down at my hands or my calves in surprise. Every day I told myself I had probably reached my capacity for building strength, and then the next week I would find that I’d added another couple of pounds on the bench. When I could lift my own body weight, I felt a surge of self-sufficiency and pride. I could literally move myself.
Rugby gave me the strength and the mental clarity to take the problems in my life apart, sit quietly with them, and then attack them. I stood up for myself, I believed in my own thoughts, I developed new analyses of power, gender, femininity. I told myself that if I could scrum down, I could do anything. When I was off the pitch, I told myself that a rugger knows and trusts her own ability. I posed naked for our team calendar and explained to my professors why with grace and grit. I knew who I was; I liked it.
I don’t know who I would have become had I never found rugby. I can only imagine a half-empty shell of myself. How could I ever have become myself without this game and these women, I think sometimes. Rugby showed me who I was, how far I could go without (literally) vomiting. Rugby pushed me harder than any person had ever been able to (although I’m sure my middle school piano teacher would say something sarcastic about this not amounting to very much). Rugby taught me how to accept only the very best of myself. How to know that I still had another few sprints in me. How to celebrate myself and my teammates and how to work together, playing off each other’s strengths. How to parlay respect into trust in crucial moments. How to keep going. How to expect miraculous things. How to work hard with no guarantee of payoff or outside recognition. How to do something because you need to, because it feels good, because it is a part of you. How to make sense of the fact that sometimes (often!) running into a tackle is the smartest play; that choosing to be hit, to dictate the terms of how you are hit gives you great power, and sets up your teammates for a beautiful next phase. How to take a deep breath, tackle a big girl running very fast, get up and run off to the next play.
I say in passing sometimes, in polite conversations with new friends or acquaintances, that I used to play rugby. “Oh yeah?”, they say, “Cool. That’s tough”. I smile, and in my head I relive my first scrum or the first time I threw a girl out of bounds into the sidelines. The time I tackled a woman twice my size and she fell on my face and they put tampons up my nose to stop the bleeding. The memories are shockingly vivid. “Yeah,” I nod, “I am pretty tough”.
I am forever indebted.
