After 30 years as a club sport, the Harvard's women rugby team begins its first as a varsity program.

The team was divided.

For 32 years, some variation of the same question sparked hundreds of Radcliffe rugby careers.

“You look like a badass, do you want to play rugby?”

It was a mantra that pervaded every aspect of the club, whether it was battling in a scrum or scratching together funds for the next road trip.

In 2011, the Radcliffe Rugby Club risked losing that persona.

Turning the club into a varsity sport would mean money for coaches, equipment, and travel. But it would come at a cost.

With no varsity counterpart, the Radcliffe Rugby Club competed at a national level, but members saw the group more like a family than a team. Transitioning to varsity would mean possibly losing what made the club special in the first place.

Proponents of the change believed they could get all of the benefits of going varsity while maintaining the culture that led them to join the club in the first place. They spoke in several team meetings in the fall of 2010. A Division II National Championship in the spring helped their case.

Eventually there was consensus, and the team wrote a letter in 2011 to the Athletic Department asking for varsity status.

Within a year, it was announced that women’s rugby would become Harvard’s 42nd varsity sport in 2013.

And on Sept. 17, the team took the field for the first time as varsity rugby players, attempting to prove that its new status hadn’t changed its fundamental identity: a team of self-declared badasses on the pitch and a close-knit family off of it.

A RUGGED START

Radcliffe Rugby’s past is the core of the team’s identity in the present.

But when the club was founded in 1982, the activity on the pitch was a far cry from the varsity team it is today. Before the squad took home national championships and practiced on its own fields, the Radcliffe rugby team practiced three times a week and served beer at its matches. In the team’s first game—a 10-6 win over the MIT Engineers—the club’s president missed part of the game to find a tap for the “traditional rugby keg of beer,” according to a Crimson report.

The team quickly became popular among high school athletes looking for another outlet. Its first meeting drew 40 women from all walks of sport, including an All-Ivy lacrosse player and high school All-American swimmer.