The Rugby Football Club returns this fall with a new coaching staff and a new attitude. A trio of coaches, each with years of experience playing and coaching the sport — often with each other — will bring a new flavor to the team.
The threesome of Maurice Kauff, Jamie Green and Thomas Collins also coach together at St. John's Prep in Danvers, Mass., where Kauff serves as JV coach, Green as varsity head coach and Collins as varsity assistant coach. Under their leadership, St. John's hasn't lost a league game in the last five years.
The team of coaches hopes to bring to Tufts the same attitude and intensity that's made them so successful at the high school level.
"There is a big movement in the United States to professional rugby — to treat it more like a sport and less like an activity," said Kauff, the head coach of the Tufts program. "For the three of us, coming from coaching in a varsity environment, we feel we have the background to bridge the gap between varsity and club.
"Our vision is to build a program that is attractive to high-school rugby players and, as coaches, to install a rugby system that promotes success on the field," he added.
The new coaching staff also brought a different structure to practices and new offensive and defensive plays. Thus far, the team has responded well to the new environment.
"Pretty much everything is made over from last year," senior co-captain Gabe Perrone said. "We have much more organization, more involvement from the coaches in terms of administrative things and all new plays. We are very impressed with how [the coaches] carry themselves and what they have brought to the team so far. They work well together and it's definitely shown."
According to Kauff, the transition has been smoothed by the fundamental rugby skills the team already possessed.
"What we have is a group of really dedicated kids and some very strong athletes, and what we're trying to do is build some structure around what we play, and teach them the fitness requirement of rugby and the mental side of the game as well," Kauff said.
The team hopes the new program will help improve their finishing skills, something the team struggled with last fall, often letting their focus slip towards the end of a match and letting leads get away.
"We want to take it one game at a time, make it like each game is our last game so we are always fighting to finish," senior co-captain Kyle Boutin said. "And in the end our ultimate goal is to make it to nationals, but we have to take each game at a time."
But the field is not the only place where the program is experiencing a makeover.
Last Saturday, Tufts rugby teamed up with the Cross Fit H2O gym in Medford for the event Fight Gone Bad 6, in which the athletes enlisted sponsors and participated in a demanding 17-minute workout while athletes around the world completed the same exercises.
"The idea behind doing the event was that the kids wanted to do some service project, so we combined that with our interest of getting our guys in shape for the season. It was a good fit," said Kauff, who has now participated in Fight Gone Bad for four years.
According to Kauff, the rugby team raised $3,200 to contribute to a total of $2.2 million raised worldwide by 16,000 participants.
The beneficiaries of the event were the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which serves to provide support to families of fallen or wounded members of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps special operations forces — and Camp Patriot, which takes disabled U.S. veterans on outdoor adventures.
"The workout itself was grueling, but the team was happy to do it, because we knew where the money was going," Boutin said. "It was just giving up 17 minutes of our time to help people who have given up months or years to serve this country."
After this positive experience, giving back is a tradition the team would like to continue.
"I'd really like to see [this event] happen again," Kauff said. "We've got a long-term plan of how we're going to build the Tufts' rugby program, and certainly doing stuff like this is going to be a part of it."
"It was definitely a positive step forward in our organization becoming a bigger presence on campus," Boutin added. "[Kauff] is very passionate about it and he's going to make sure that Tufts rugby continues to give back to the community and do fundraisers in the future."
However, the rugby team is not looking to change everything about the previous program, which made it to the semifinals of the New England Div. III Championships for the second consecutive season last fall, finishing their season with a 7-2 record. In the spring, the team was ranked ninth nationally by the National Small College Rugby Organization.
"Our defense was probably one of our best attributes last year," Perrone said. "Our seniors really stepped up and set the tone on defense, but we have some young, dedicated athletes who will be able to fill in and do what the seniors did last year."
The Jumbos hope to be able to make it past the semifinals this year, where their season ended in 2009 and 2010. They have their eyes set on competing at the national level.
"The boys have laid out some pretty ambitious goals for themselves, so our job as coaches is just to give them the systems and the tools to get to that," Kauff said. "We're trying to focus on just trying to win what's right in front of us and not look too far down the road, but I would not be surprised if in the near future, you saw Tufts competing for a national championship in rugby."
Tufts opens its season against Wentworth Institute on Oct. 1 on the Alumni Fields, where the Jumbos hope to show their opponents — and themselves — that they can successfully execute their new system.
"As seniors, we are definitely excited for what could potentially happen this year," Perrone said. "We hope to build on our success last year, and we hope that the new coaching staff can take us to the next level."
