THE SCRUM IS LESS than a minute of pure, concentrated effort. Beyond force, it’s a contest of balance. “We try to emulate each other’s energy and become not eight people but one.”

“Synergy,” says one player. “Presence,” says another. Acceptance. Loyalty. Purpose. Each time a new player goes up to share, the room explodes with a chorus of shouted nicknames, cheers, and applause. Crying or laughing—on the pitch or on the sidelines—Brown rugby is a team that feels, hard.

“No one cares, work harder,” reads the text on the back of each warmup jersey—a classic Flores quote, and Brown rugby’s general approach to the game. 

Bring Your Strength, Not Your Diet
Earlier that week, I spent a large portion of Tuesday’s practice sitting in the end zone with a group of players I’d heard Emme Ohnmacht ’25, the team’s manager, lovingly refer to as the “injury squad.” For a sport as physically demanding as rugby, injuries are somewhat to be expected. They’re part of what keeps Nyrel Stroup, the team’s athletic trainer, so busy. (Injuries also keep the job exciting, he tells me—for him, it’s rugby or he’ll walk.) 

While most players on the team are lifelong athletes, they’re not necessarily lifelong rugby players. For one player, before rugby it was field hockey; for another it was dance. One played soccer, one ran track, and another competed in figure skating. Students in the U.S.—particularly women—aren’t often exposed to rugby early on. It’s why most players, even some of the best in the country, come to rugby relatively late. 

This is a unique position for a D1 varsity team. Most of the team’s recruited athletes have been playing for only a few years, and the rest of the team joined the program as walk-ons, many of whom hadn’t played rugby before coming to Brown. “Imagine asking someone to join the swim team who’s never swum before—to be an NCAA Division 1 swimmer,” Chou says. “You’d drown, right?”

But it’s exactly that “walk-on mentality” that defines the ethos of the sport, Coach Chou argues. Case in point: Trinity Williams ’26 never envisioned herself playing a sport in college, much less playing rugby. But then classmate Noelle Lewis ’24 introduced her to the game. “I’m five-one. I have never done any kind of contact sport in my life,” Williams remembers telling her. But Lewis reassured her that rugby, as Coach Chou says, is for everyone: there’s a position designed for each build of player. Wings like Williams tend to be short and fast. Props are generally large and commanding. Locks skew muscular and tall. 

“IF YOU’RE GONNA WIN a collision, you need as much weight as possible... You need as much muscle as possible.” In rugby, players are valuable because of their size, not in spite of it.

There on the field I first meet Erinn Harley-Lewis, holding onto a massive bowl of pasta salad. The mother of senior Noelle, Harley-Lewis is the official unofficial rugby team mom, who spearheads culinary preparations for each home game with the help of Terry Mahoney, the dad of junior Elizabeth. There is one slight complication. Harley-Lewis and her family live in Northern Virginia, approximately 425 miles from Providence. It hasn’t stopped her yet.

During the season, Harley-Lewis leaves Virginia on Thursday nights to make the drive up I-95 towards New England with a car full of pre-prepped ingredients (if she gets lucky enough to beat traffic, the drive can be done in seven hours, but most of the time it takes eight). The main prep begins on Friday. Harley-Lewis sometimes slow-cooks meat throughout the night, or wakes up at three or four the following morning to prepare enough food to feed two hungry rugby teams, their families, and spectators—all in her hotel room kitchenette. 

With the preparations for today’s feast now securely stashed past the end zone, the game can officially begin. It isn’t yet five minutes after kickoff when the players first set up for a scrum. 

The scrum is a defining feature of rugby: the “little wrestling match” that restarts play, often after the ball is fumbled forwards, Nat Phonwiang ’27 explains (in rugby, the ball can legally be passed backward only). When a scrum is called, eight players from each team weave together to form two massive opposing huddles, with two players, called hookers, at the helm. The ball is then dropped between them, prompting each group to press forward in an attempt to push the opposing team back. 

The scrum is less than a minute of pure, concentrated effort. Beyond force, it’s a contest of balance. “We try to emulate each other’s energy and become not eight people but one,” explains Vandevoorde. “One plus one equals three,” adds Nikki Lynch ’24. Teamwork is more than just an athletic strategy, the players argue; coaction is the essence of the game. 

“There is a culture of family in all rugby,” says Coach Kitt. It’s intensely combative, but rugby is also defined by camaraderie. Even today, the world of women’s rugby is small, and it’s not uncommon for players to know several members of the opposing team during matches. The relative insularity has allowed the sport’s customs to thrive behind the scenes. 

For Coach Chou, the come-as-you-are mindset was one of the first things to attract her to the game, along with rugby’s reputation as a hub of queer culture. When Chou first began college as a member of the Florida State softball team, she recalls a level of normalized secrecy—an expectation to keep your sexuality hidden. “People painfully hiding who they were, not wanting to come out,” she recalls.

That all changed when she joined the FSU rugby team as a junior. Her first coach was openly out as gay, and so were many of her teammates. As a young, questioning queer person at a time when LGBTQ+ acceptance was far from widespread, this form of open representation was world-shifting. Her experience isn’t unique—rugby has historically had a prominent queer presence, and on the international level, there’s a long tradition of forming explicitly gay rugby teams. “Everything’s gay about rugby,” Phonwiang laughs. “On previous teams, I had trouble finding people who were like me and when I came to rugby they immediately clocked me.” 

Players of all sexual orientations have long had to counter gendered expectations. After all, rugby is far from traditionally feminine. The first recorded women’s rugby matches date back to the mid-19th century. Even in 1991, however, the first women’s Rugby World Cup received no official backing from the International Rugby Board, and the winning U.S. national team had to design and sell T-shirts to help cover the tournament’s expenses. Long ignored—or disregarded as spectacle—recognition has often come late for women’s rugby players. It wasn’t until 2009 that the board officially acknowledged the ’91 World Cup, and not until 2014 that the first woman was inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame. (Flores was inducted posthumously in 2022.)

For Brown’s players, standing in opposition to this history can itself be a motivating factor. “You always get that eyebrow raise,” says Lynch. “I think that’s really what motivates me.” The more mainstream recognition women’s rugby attracts, particularly on the professional level, the more women become exposed to the game. World Rugby notes that a quarter of players globally are women, up 53 percent in the past year. 

THIS INTENSITY REQUIRES a baseline of trust, the players argue. It all comes back to that common refrain. “We’re literally putting our bodies on the line for each other every single day at practice,” says Vandevoorde. 

Better Humans
Coach Chou’s academic work forms the foundation of her coaching philosophy. As a critical race theory scholar currently writing a book about the queer experience on college campuses, there aren’t many boundaries between the issues her players experience in real life and the academic theories she teaches in the classroom. While coaching at Life University, she and her students led protests against the anti-trans “bathroom bills” being proposed in Florida at the time. At Brown, the coaches have made it a point not to hide their queer identities or shy away from difficult conversations as a team—whether it’s women’s health, the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, or the murder of George Floyd. “Coaching is teaching, teaching is coaching,” she says. And the wider world is the center of both. 

It’s another lesson that comes back to Flores.

“Kathy understood where I was coming from and how it was going to be a big transition,” says Akilah Cathey ’25, whom Flores recruited to the team. A sought-after player in high school, Cathey was weighing a few competitive recruitment offers. But it was Flores who made Brown stand out. The two talked candidly about race and identity—and how students of color like Cathey often struggle to find space at predominantly white institutions such as Brown, and as players within the wider world of rugby. “First you get that rugby is a white sport and then you get that rugby is a male-dominated sport,” Cathey explains. 

When Cathey first came to Brown, Flores, who was of Filipino and Hawaiian descent, encouraged her to connect with the Third World Transition Program, an orientation program led by the Brown Center for Students of Color. “It’s good to see people look like you,” Flores told her at the time. “Just because you’re at a PWI [predominantly white institution] doesn’t mean you should hide your identity.” Today, Cathey pays this mentorship forward by being a voice for younger players, particularly those of color, who join the program. “The people of color on the team, we truly have our own community and our own support,” says Williams. 

Having grown up as the only Asian student on her high-school basketball and softball teams, Coach Chou has experienced this same isolation first-hand. And just as for Flores, it now informs her strategy as a coach. Since gaining varsity status, Brown’s coaches have used the program’s additional funding and recruiting capacity to increase the racial and socioeconomic diversity of Brown’s team over the past decade. Beyond the roster, Coach Chou is thoughtful about how she shapes the team’s culture. “I want you to be a better human being off the field and I also want you to be a better human being on the field, to your teammates,” she says. “The more you have this space of support, the better your team’s going to be, whether you win on the scoreboard or not.”