Rugby has been woven into the fabric of Dartmouth College for 149 years, and this weekend the sport celebrates that history and, more specifically, the 75th anniversary of the Dartmouth Rugby Football Club, the college’s men’s team.
Hundreds of alums and friends of the club have been invited to campus for festivities that began on Friday and run through the entire weekend, including a tour of the Corey Ford Rugby Clubhouse, which reopened after a renovation and expansion last year, a chance to watch this year’s squad take on Fairfield University and a dinner, among other activities.
Dan Kenslea — who graduated from Dartmouth in 1975, played as a student and eventually, in 2003, became chair of the club’s board of governors, a role he held until 2018 before becoming chair emeritus through 2021 — shared his excitement for the celebration.
“I think I speak for most Dartmouth rugby alums: You get a little chill when you turn the corner out there by the rotary and you see the clubhouse, and you know you’re going to watch a Dartmouth rugby match,” he said. “And it’s even more special when they get to do it with so many other alums who are going to be coming into town this weekend.”
While the weekend serves as an opportunity for celebration, it also is a way to show appreciation.
“I think what’s going to be really fun is to be able to thank — for the club and the college — so many generations of student-athletes who’ve come through here,” said Alex Magleby, who played for the Big Green from 1996 to 2000, coached them from 2001 to 2012 and served as an advisor to the club through 2022.
“They leave it better than they found it. They’ve improved it and then they leave, and then they donate back to the program, and that’s what’s made it work,” he added.
The DRFC is fully funded through alumni support and currently has an almost $7 million endowment, which has increased by $4 million in the last five years, Rich Schneider, the club’s chairman of the Board of Governors, wrote in an email.
Though the club was founded in 1951, rugby at Dartmouth dates back to 1877, according to the DRFC website, when the sport was first played on campus.
Since the DRFC’s founding, it has traveled worldwide to play matches. Notably, Dartmouth was the first American college to play in England and Ireland, per the club’s website.
The Big Green have also seen their fair share of success on the pitch over the years.
Dartmouth had an undefeated season in 1965, was national championship runner-up in 1986 and 1988, has won several Ivy championships and, in the early 2010s, won back-to-back USA Sevens College Rugby titles, among other accolades.
More recently, under head coach Kyle Sumsion, now in his fifth year heading up the club, the DRFC has been national champion runners-up in sevens twice.
The team has started 2-0 in 15s this season, with wins over American International and McGill. GoffRugbyReport, which covers various levels of the sport in the United States, ranks the Big Green No. 5 among national collegiate rugby’s Division I teams.
Although the men’s rugby team is technically a club sport at the college, it still plays Division I competition as part of the Liberty Rugby Conference.
“I think that’s what’s so unique about the college landscape for rugby, specifically here. So there’s a bunch of teams that we play within our conference that would be considered varsity, meaning that they’re giving scholarships out, they’re recruiting players and giving admission support,” Sumsion said.
“Then there’s other teams that would be like us that would be considered elevated clubs; you know, that would be us, that would be Brown, you know, and a handful of others here,” he added.
American International, out of Springfield, Mass., is one of those varsity programs.
While success on the pitch is nice, that is not the only important thing to the club and its members. Sumsion explained that the DRFC is also trying to build leaders and better men through the game, with values it stresses such as trust.
“The reality is that once these young men graduate, they’re likely not going to go change the world in the game of rugby. The reality is they’re going to go change the world in their respective professions here,” he said.
“Our vision on the Dartmouth rugby team is that the world is a better place with a Dartmouth rugby player in it,” he said.
Over the years, the sport and the club itself have changed, something that has stood out to Wayne Young, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1972, coached the rugby team from 1986 to 2000 and helped with the organization of building the Corey Ford Rugby Clubhouse, which opened in 2005, a reality.
“It’s evolved now into a program that has coaching, has a clubhouse, is well organized, has a good alumni body that raises a lot of money. You put all that together, it’s a pretty good outfit to belong to,” he said.
Despite those changes, the abovementioned themes about building up players off the pitch have remained consistent, even with some hijinks along the way.
The most notorious came in 1974, when four players went to jail in Bermuda for streaking naked on a beach.
“For all of its history, rugby at Dartmouth has been about student-athlete leadership development, and that’s come in multiple different ways,” Magleby said.
“It is still at its core giving an opportunity for players to learn how to, in a relatively safe environment, manage each other under pressure, raise money, organize a team and all of those things,” he added.
As the club moves forward, Schneider wrote in an email that the DRFC is aiming to be fully endowed, which means it would need to reach the $15 million mark.
Reaching that goal would allow the club “to compete aggressively with the best-resourced programs in the country. It gives our coaches the resources to recruit at the level the program deserves. And it puts us in position to eliminate or significantly reduce tour fees and dues for student-athletes, removing financial barriers so that the best players can focus on playing, leading and representing Dartmouth Rugby without unnecessary cost,” Schneider wrote.
“We have a plan to get there, but it will take time.”
