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A rugby pitch, two teams, and a scrum locked up just meters away from the try line underneath the roar of a raucous crowd.

In a scene drawn straight from the 1982 Ivy League men’s rugby championship, the fans cheer on the Harvard men’s rugby team as the scrum engages and the ball is thrown. One group, though, does more than just watch: the women of Radcliffe cheer from the sideline and, at the same time, wonder if they can’t play in a league of their own.

The Crimson men would go on to defeat Yale in the finals, 33-12, capturing the 1982 Ivy League championship, but, along the way, they also played a role in sparking the creation of a women’s team. Indeed, the Harvard Radcliffe Rugby Football Club (HRRFC) was born later that year.

“We started hearing comments from some of the men’s rugby players saying that ‘you guys should stop watching and start playing,’” said Jeanne Reid, ’84, a member of the original Radcliffe club. “And so we did.”

The fledgling group didn’t face pleasant odds: women hardly played rugby, and there were very few women’s clubs back then. Questions remained, but the women of Radcliffe Rugby didn’t create the club just to see it fall apart. Instead, the women from Radcliffe used the glue of camaraderie and the catalyst of determination to transform it into a thriving club still very much alive and kicking today.

“It was a nice combination of a very strong team with very good athletes, and people who were there to have fun,” Reid said. “We had a lot of fun together, and so the sport was very much both an athletic endeavor as well as a social one.”

In addition to creating strong friendships and bonds, the team didn’t forget what they had set out to do on the pitch: the women from Radcliffe were relentless. They woke early, practiced in the mud, washed their own uniforms, fundraised, and pushed themselves in intense training sessions to become fit and game-ready, day in and day out.

“All those kinds of things—they just kept going and kept fighting for what they loved, despite the fact that they didn’t have any support from the school,” said senior Hope Schwartz, the current captain of the women’s rugby team. “And it was because they loved their sport and they loved each other.”

Reid remembers the adversity providing an incentive for the new club as it rose to prominence in a novel sport.

“I think we felt pretty excited to be part of the beginnings of the sport for women,” she said. “It was very young then, and it was fun to be part of that—and the name Radcliffe emphasized the fact that we were a women’s rugby team, and there weren’t a lot of us back then. There was also some pressure then to show that we could do it. Our coaches pushed us to see if we could in terms of the fitness, maybe a little too hard, but needless to say, we weren’t going to give up.”

Starting anything from scratch is simply difficult. However, with the determined and supportive group of women that it brought together, the Radcliffe rugby club used its familial bonds to overcome the obstacles set before it.

“There was a lot of camaraderie there because we were trying to do something that was hard,” Reid said. “We’re still very good friends.”

As a testament to the strength of the multi-faceted foundation that its founders laid, the Radcliffe rugby club captured its first Collegiate National Championship in 1998 and, in 2013, went varsity— more than 30 years after its initial creation.

Immediately following the triumphant 1998 season, on October 1, 1999, Radcliffe College ceased to exist in name, absorbed into Harvard after a long merger period that began in 1977. Even after going varsity three years ago the Radcliffe Rugby team kept the name—the legacy of Radcliffe is one that the today’s teams don’t forget.