RUGBY SEASON IS BEGUN!!

Yesterday was our first rugby game of the season, HURRAH!

We played JMU (James Madison), which was 2 hours way out in Virginia. They're a pretty good team, plus we got to use a relatively nice field (there were bleachers! And the main building was unlocked so we got to use actual bathrooms!)

It was SO AMAZINGLY GOOD to play again. We've done a few ruck-and-runs at practice, but no REAL rugby. I played the first half of the A-side game at wing, and the first half of the B-side game at fullback, and had SUCH a good time! I did pretty well too - got some lovely tackles in at wing (and made them, too - I don't know if I missed a tackle! Okay, maybe one or two) and had a handful of runs at fullback when JMU kicked the ball.

The whole team didn't do extraordinarily well, but considering that JMU's pretty good and we were fielding a lot of rookies, it was a good game. The mistakes we made were predictable for rookies, and will be fixed with just a little experience. We lost pretty badly (only got one try - Nips put one in B-side), but we had FUN!

Injury report: I banged my head pretty badly at least twice when I was in at A-side (once when rolling over some girl I tackled, once when I was too preoccupied with passing the ball out of a tackle to pay attention to how I was landing), but nothing happened besides a bitty headache that went away with a few cups of beer at the social afterwards. I did, however, in the first few minutes of the A-side game, get a really nasty bruise just above my left knee. It was like someone had cut a tennis ball in half and stuck it to my leg, and it hurt like a bitch to run on it. But I wasn't going to let a bruise stop me from playing! I've been icing it since the games were over, though, and even though it was still pretty swollen last night it's pretty much back to normal now. Still hurts, though, and I decided not to go to campus for the sci fi movie tonight because I didn't want to walk that far on it.

I can't WAIT for next weekend!