Harvard Women Take Rugby Title

The Harvard varsity women’s rugby team [3] opened their initial season in style, bagging the Ivy League championship [4] with a 29-0 victory over Dartmouth in the final of the Ancient Eight tourney in Hanover, New Hampshire on November 3.  Only a few months ago, women’s rugby became Harvard’s forty-second varsity sport. [5] Under the leadership of coach Sue Parker, [6] the ruggers compiled a 5-2 record, suffering losses only to Quinnipiac  (39-10) in their first varsity game and to Dartmouth (10-5), their first away opponent.

Yet the resilient ruggers bounced back from the Quinnipiac loss by demolishing Yale, 84-0, at home, and won their final four contests over Brown, Princeton, Brown again (Ivy semifinal), and Dartmouth. The Big Green were seeded first, the Crimson second, in the Ivy tournament, but Harvard kept the Hanover women off the scoreboard in nailing down the title. A measure of Harvard’s dominance is that those four season-closing victories saw them outscoring opponents 153-12. Harvard will compete in the USA Rugby 7s tournament at Texas A&M on November 22 through 24.