After a tumultuous year in which they struggled to schedule games and remain competitive, the University of Maine women’s club rugby team has found a home in the New England Small College Rugby Conference.
The NESCRC, founded in the spring of 2012, accepted UMaine last weekend as the eighth member to the young conference. It is comprised of Division-II teams from the all over New England. UMaine will be the first Division-I college to compete in the NESCRC.
“There was a larger Division-I league that [had] a lot of larger teams like [the University of New Hampshire and the University of Connecticut],” senior and former president Brianna Duhaime said. “That is why NESCRC is perfect for us because it is a smaller program.”
Women’s rugby has a strong tradition at UMaine, beginning nearly 25 years ago. Rugby conferences are relatively new to the area. The regular season takes place in the fall, but they play two large New England tournaments in the spring.
“This is a great opportunity for our team,” said newly elected Pres. Caitlin Morgan. “This year we will be in a league with teams we know will be on our level, so we will have some good competition.”
The acceptance into the NESCRC comes after a difficult year for the Black Bears. The team fell between the cracks of the Division-I American Collegiate Rugby Association and NESCRC, but thanks to help from NESCRC member Bowdoin University and their coach, Mary Beth Matthews, they were able to find a place to consistently play this fall.
“Last summer, when they were forming the [conference], they assumed we would be in NESCRC last year,” Duhaime said. “Mary Beth knew us and our situation and as much as she wanted to make room for us, it was too close to do it. We worked with her to get games last fall – to get teams on their bye weeks or whenever we could [schedule] games.”
The team also worked with Norwich University head coach Austin Hall to coordinate games with teams from the ACRA to schedule games with bigger teams.
There were many challenges last fall that faced the Black Bears due to their lack of a consistent schedule. For one, they could not get a good idea of what kind of team they were or their skill level and had trouble teaching the sport to those learning it for the first time.
“We recruited a lot,” Duhaime said. “We used that season as a building [block] to work on little things that we might not have been able to do if we had a full schedule. It has just made us more hungry for next year.”
The rugby team’s first real test this spring came at the Beast of the East Tournament, which will be followed up by their second and final tournament of the spring in the beginning of May. With very little experience with this group of players, it will serve as a benchmark for the future of the program.
“Beast of the East is this weekend, which is very exciting,” Morgan said. “The team changes a lot so the team we bring down this weekend may be different than the next tournament. It will tell us a lot.”
The Black Bears split their matches on the first day of play, losing to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth before beating the College of the Holy Cross. They were awarded a win when Brandeis University forfeited Sunday morning before falling in the tournament semifinals to the Wentworth Institute of Technology.
The Black Bears graduate six seniors this year, so the team they field in the fall will be very different from the one they have this spring. But with a consistent schedule and growing interest in the sport, things are looking up for UMaine’s women’s rugby team.
Team members include graduate student Dawn Sullivan; seniors Duhaime, Erin Feeley, Grace Hubbard, Joelle Joyce, Ellin Hale, Elizabeth Anderson and Morgan; juniors Meagan Doucette, Melissa Byrnes, Nikole Robbins, Sophia Scontras and Autumn Murtagh; sophomores Courtney McCrodden, Michaela Price, Jennifer Davis, Andrea Praul, Carolyn Fox, Samantha Werzanski, Molly Nevins, Kate McCleod and Monica Keating; and freshmen Kesley Moon and Mollie Pfahler.