By Kate Elizabeth Queram   kqueram@dnronline.com

A physical sport resulting in plenty of bruises, rugby is addictive once you get the hang of it, members say. Photo by Nikki Fox

The girls’ legs are a gallery of bruises.

They congregate on the sidelines of the turf field outside James Madison University’s UREC facility, sipping from water bottles, the chilly October air adding pink to the litany of colors already decorating their battered limbs. The right leg of one girl is one huge wound, mottled from ankle to thigh with shades of purple, green and gray. Another girl, seated on the ground tying her shoes, sports small brown dots circling a large, raised purple welt on her left shin.

“Turf burn,” she says with a shrug. “I don’t think it’s going to go away.”

Even if the mark fades, there’s a good chance it’ll reappear. The group of girls wearing cleats and shorts and gathered next to the field are the members of JMU’s club rugby team, and they don’t shy away from battle wounds — even if it means having to explain them for days after.

“[People] ask what happened, and I say, ‘Oh I play rugby,’ ” says Kelsi Kao, a 20-year-old sophomore from State College, Pa. “And they say, ‘OK.’ I guess that’s enough of an explanation.”

Thanks to its no-holds-barred, full-tackle nature, rugby has a reputation for roughness — and, as the cause of all the wounds here today, it’s well-deserved.

Three afternoons per week the JMU team shows up on the practice field to hone their kicking, running and tackling in preparation for weekend games. And though the girls are fierce and fearless, they’re not what you expect a rugby team to look like.

“I think people think they’re sort of burly, scary women, and they’re not,” says Roshna Wunderlich, the team’s coach and a biology professor at JMU. “They’re kind of girly and silly. I would buy a few big sturdy girls if I could find them. We get lots of tiny ones.” She pauses, then adds with a grin, “Probably our toughest ones are our tiny ones.”

Though the stereotype of a woman rugby player is that of a large, hulking silhouette, almost all of the girls on the JMU team are small to average-sized; a discrepancy that doesn’t go unnoticed by rugby neophytes.

“For me, since I’m smaller, people are like, ‘You play rugby?’ …. They just laugh,” says Cathy Wright, a senior from Botetourt. “There is that stereotype of rugby girls, but there is a position for all sized girls. I just have to explain that to them.”

Though people unfamiliar with the sport may think otherwise, Wunderlich says the varying sizes among women rugby players isn’t a new trend.

“I don’t think it’s really changed at all. There’s always been a mix,” she says. “We have everyone from gymnasts and cheerleaders to girls who say, ‘I’ve played powder puff football’ and ‘I’ve been a soccer goalie.’ We really get a range. There’s definitely a place for all of them.”

The diversity of the women attracted to rugby is reflective of the sport itself. Rugby is most commonly described as a mix of soccer and football, and while players can both kick and throw the ball and are allowed to tackle, the reality of the sport is much more complicated. For example, though game play advances forward on the field, the ball can only be passed backwards. Most confrontation is one-on-one, and if a player gets tackled, they’re required to let go of the ball immediately. And when players go down, the game doesn’t stop. Play is continuous for both 40-minute halves. There aren’t even timeouts.

“Rugby’s pretty different from any sport I’ve played before,” says Marguerite Hansell, a 20-year-old junior who previously played softball and field hockey. “It’s really hard to get used to. Definitely for your first semester you’re confused the whole time.”

But once you get the hang of it, you’re hooked, according to the team — in part due to, and not in spite of, the inevitable bumps and bruises.

“It was weird at first because no other sport, other than football, which guys play, involved that much physicality,” says Kao, who added that the full-out tackling and aggression involved in rugby is “the antithesis of being a girl. But I think it’s fun …  in a game, you really get into it. I just like it because rugby involves every single aspect of endurance, sprinting and just all-out being physically strong.”

Hansell agrees. “I like it because it is hardcore like that,” she says. “You can use every part of your body. You do whatever you have to do,” she says.

Today’s practice seems to revolve around that theme. The team starts by breaking into small groups to practice “individual skills” — for some, that’s passing, which involves picking the ball up from the ground and flinging it to a teammate. For others, it’s honing dropkicks, because “you can score by  dropkicking the ball through the posts,” Wunderlich explains.

The rest of practice is devoted to a series of drills designed to help the team learn to protect the ball. In one, they break into twosomes, where one girl holds the ball and protects it from the other, who charges at her. In another, one girl again holds the ball, bent over, while the other tries to steal it. Then they organize into larger groups, where the ball carrier falls to the ground and the others rush forward to deflect the oncoming players.

From the sidelines, 20-year-old junior Maryann Walbert observes practice. She warmed up with the team, but her left leg, badly bruised in last week’s game, has begun to swell; she’s seated on the bleachers with three bags of ice strapped to her shin with plastic wrap. It’s hard to walk, she says, but she’ll probably still play in this weekend’s game.

“We have bruises all over the place,” she says. “It’s kind of neat.”

It’s not just the contact, though. The majority of the team members say it’s the camaraderie, both within their own team and with others, that keeps them hitting the field week after week. According to Molly Whittaker, the team’s assistant coach, the combination of physical empowerment and friendship makes rugby the ultimate rewarding experience.

“It’s very, very empowering. You use your body in a different way and even if it doesn’t look like it, there’s so much thinking going on,” she says. “And no matter where you are in the world, if you play rugby, you’re part of a family.”