HARTFORD, Conn. — It’s all action under the bright lights at Trinity College as the rugby team hits the field.
It’s a sport that the athletes love but remains unfamiliar to others.
“It is very continuous. It's not like football where you play for five seconds and stop,” explained Trinity College rugby player Aidan Cavanaugh.
"Rugby is ultimate chaos," said Trinity College rugby Coach Ed Matteo. "So the goal of rugby is to advance the ball forward into the tri-zone or touchdown area and place it down."
That’s where any similarities to football end.
“The only way to move the ball forward in rugby is to either run it or kick it," said Matteo. "You can’t pass the ball forward, you have to pass the ball backward to go forward.”
One trick of tackling rugby is mastering the scrimmage, or "scrum" for short. Scrum is a play that rugby players have where players pack closely together in order to get possession of the ball.
“The scrum is a set play that we have. It’s sort of like – the bigger guys on each team have to fight against [each other] to see who has the best big guys in a way," teammate Lachlan Clark explained. "It happens during certain times of the game."
Not only is there a scrum but a "ruck" as well.
“A ruck is where you should be more worried about surviving because that is where you kind of just go at them,” said Cavanaugh.
Rugby is said to have started roughly 200 years ago at the rugby school in England and it soon spread around the globe. Today the sport is hugely popular in places like Australia. In Ireland, it’s a way of life.
“It is amazing. The culture over there embraces the game. They have every age group, size, come out to support the game," said Matteo. “Everyone comes after the game, after they beat each other up, to share food, stories – they have Irish music there, fiddle players, they are singing and it is just a phenomenal post-game activity to bring both clubs together."
“It is really cool, it is kind of like nothing else you can kind of explain, adrenaline is going crazy, time stops," said Clark.
Cavanaugh offered some advice for people who may have never played rugby but may want to give it a try.
“Come with an open mind. Obviously, it is going to be weird at first, your passing backward, you’re tackling with no pads, it’s all about technique. If you get the technique, you realize it is a really fun game,” he said.
If you want to check out a Trinity rugby match, the team’s season runs from March until June and is open to the public. You can learn more here.
Keith McGilvery is an anchor and reporter at FOX61 News. He can be reached at kmcgilvery@fox61.com. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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