Saturday was a rugby day...
...so we had to leave on Friday. It was, after all, a seven hour drive out to Tech. The drive up was fairly uneventful, though the word "uneventful" is relative. We managed to only leave 20 minutes late, and we made it an entire two hours before anyone had to pee! The first gas station we stopped at was tiny, with only a single unisex toilet, and while half the team was standing in line, the other half wiped out the candy selection. Once everyone was stocked up on junk food, we woke up that tiny little town with an awesome dance party in the parking lot. It was sweet. We cranked up one of the rental van's speakers and did the wobble in the parking lot, which was only a metric ton of fun.
We then drove another five hours. In West Texas. Ugh.
But then we were in our hotel, and we had our pump-up team meeting, and went to bed, and then it was Saturday!
What none of us really realized on the way up was that College Station is at 300 ft elevation. Tech is at 3000 ft above sea level. I didn't know that until after the game, but I knew something was up as soon as we got on the pitch. After the first ten meter sprint during warm up, I was already breathing hard, which was a very obvious indicator that something was up. I'm a forward, and running isn't exactly my thing...but ten meters. I shouldn't have been ready to keel over.
I knew I couldn't keel over, though, because that would mean touching the grass. West Texas is not meant to support human life, and that is made very clear by the state of their grass. It was yellow. And dead. And sharp. Every step we took kicked up more "grass" than it left behind. You can't control the field, though, any more than you can control the elevation.
I'm serious about that elevation. If Imma play rugby, I need my mother-fuckin' air.
As a rookie, who at this point had zero in-game experience, I was relegated to the sidelines to run water. The Almighty Coach wasn't with us for this game, so we had a friend of the team come along. He'd never seen me play (because I hadn't), but I don't think he realized that I'd never been on a pitch outside practice, since as soon as the first half ended, he turned to me and said to get warmed up. I was going to play almost all of the second half.
I was torn between dancing, crying, running away, and vomiting. I had been so excited to play some rugby before then, but then when the possibility of being in a game was right in front of my face, I got REAL scared. But then half time was over, and the game had started again, and he called me over to go in as a sub. (Later, Big Mama would tell me that I looked like I was about to faint, and she was completely right.)
I went in as a loose-head prop, which I'd never played, and my opposing tight-head had about eight inches of shoulder-width and fifty pounds on me. I could engage her in the scrum all I liked, but I was relying on my lock to keep me from getting pushed right off to the side, which A-train did very, very well. Even if the scrums were terrifying, the game itself was exhilarating. The team was running a new play that week called "Bang-Bang," and when Doc called for a forward to get on her ass, I happened to be the closest one. The play didn't go exactly as planned, and she ended up offloading the ball to me. I had about a microsecond of sheer panic, then I took off like a bat out of hell.
It felt like that, anyway. In all truth, I'm not that fast, so it probably looked pretty sad.
Anyway, I'm running with the ball, then--HOLY SHIT I'M OFF THE GROUND WHERE IS THE GROUND. Someone had picked me up (like an idiot, I held the ball away from her instead of to my chest--got yelled at for that later), and my feet were an untold distance from the ground. Somehow, though, when she went to take me to ground, I got my feet back under me. I heard teammates behind me yelling "GO DOWN!," but since I'm a rookie, I'm never on offense during team patterns. The only "go down" I hear on a regular basis is in reference to my body position on Tackle Wednesdays, so, out of sheer habit I drop my body and keep driving forward. Eventually, it clicks and I go down and post the ball, but for those moments, I felt like a serious bad-ass.
After that, I was mostly support, but it was still really cool to be part of the team that way, instead of watching from the sidelines. We won the game, and I got some praise from our fitness coach for being in the right place at the right time to support my teammates. The most exciting part of that game, though, was that afterwards, even though my lungs were absolutely screaming for air, my body felt like it could have kept going. My fitness level isn't great, but it's improved a lot since I joined the team, so I was really excited not to feel like I was about to die.
Anyway, that was a long post about my first game of rugby. I'm really excited to play some more in what's left of the season!
