Rugby is American football, without pads and helmets, and without mass substitutions – and if you’re bleeding after a hit, nothing to it, ’tis but a scratch.
“I hate being pulled out, even just to catch my breath. I want to be out there for the full 80 minutes,” said Perry Allen, a member of the Virginia Rugby Football Club, which will host the Virginia Beach Falcons on Saturday at VFW Post 1827 in Charlottesville in the first round of the Division 3 playoffs.
Significant others, prospective players, no worries – it’s safe.
More on that as we dive into the sport.
Interested?
- Practices are held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at VFW Post 1827, 1170 River Road, Charlottesville.
First, I want to tell you that VRFC finished its 2025-2026 matrix season with a 6-0 record, defeating its opponents in the D3 South Division by a 66-9 average final score.
The local club team, founded in 1961, has made deep runs into the national playoffs over its long and storied history, with a fourth-place national finish in 2009-2010, and a national Sweet 16 appearance in 2017-2018.
The players come from all walks of life – students, guys who played in college, athletes from other sports looking for a new challenge.
And they hail from pretty much everywhere.
“Charlottesville really is a mixing pot, both because of the university and just the town’s, we’ll just call them vibes, right?” said Travis Brown, a former offensive lineman at the high-school level, who reached out to me earlier this week to gauge my interest in doing a story on VRFC – which, I was like, I know absolutely nothing about rugby, but, yes, I want to learn.
The roster includes a former pro, a plumber in his 40s, an orphan who grew playing rugby on the streets of Kenya.
“It’s kind of like The Avengers coming together,” said Brown, who played rugby in college, was away from the game for several years, then showed up at a VRFC practice two years ago just looking for a way to “get in some cardio, maybe play on a second team.”
The cardio helped him drop 60 pounds, to his current 240, “which tells you kind of what two seasons of rugby will do to you, just get you into shape.”
Kerry Griggs, a Charlottesville real-estate agent, got into the game after meeting a guy at a job site who was playing locally, and convinced Griggs, who is 5’7”, that “there’s a position out there for everybody,” not just former O linemen.
“It’s a great way to get in shape and just get to know some real good people,” Griggs said. “I like to tell people when we’re recruiting for rugby, you walk onto the field with 15 new friends, because really, it’s a really nice sport to be a part of. You think it’s going to be a little bit barbaric, but they’re some of the nicest guys that you’ll ever play sports with.”
It was Griggs who offered up the classic line about rugby: “They say that soccer is a game for gentlemen played by hoodlums, and rugby is a game for hoodlums played by gentlemen.
Brown explained to me how the sport is played – and that it’s similar to football, but not 100 percent.
Football players, per Brown, “have a lot of bad habits that don’t exactly translate,” going on to offer that “the sport that translates the most is probably wrestling.”
“The way we tackle is very similar to, like a single leg, like, blast double or single leg. It’s very similar kind of body movements, that perception of understanding where your body is in space,” Brown said.
But like football, yeah, it’s a contact sport, and it requires a football mentality.
“It takes a special type of person to step on the field and be like, I’m going to run into that dude, and that dude’s going to run into me,” Brown said.
“That was one of the things that I’ve always found fascinating about the sport,” Brown said, “is, like, you watch, like football players in the NFL where they get hurt and they come off the field and you may not see them again the rest of the game.
“With rugby, you’ll have a guy, like, I’ve seen videos all over social media where you’ve got players with broken ribs and, like, mangled fingers from a tackle or something, and they’re sitting there talking to the athletic trainers like, no, no, I’m fine, I can keep playing, let’s just keep going. Because they never want to come off the field,” Allen said.
A key difference between rugby and football – since the rugby players don’t wear helmets, you don’t see the violent high-speed, head-forward collisions that you see in football, where the helmets give the players a sense of invincibility.
“Rugby tends to be a much safer sport when it comes to that aspect, because we’re so hyper aware of our head and where we put it when we tackle and where it is when we’re on the ground. And, just the rules around rugby, in the way that that we have to tackle low, that also protects the head and the neck area,” Brown said.
OK, so, see, it’s safe, though, yes, also rough.
You’re still blocking, tackling, generally speaking, roughhousing.
Don’t worry; if you’re thinking about giving it a try, they’ll teach you.
“It’s not just experienced players. We have tons of newbies,” Brown said. “We have tons of people who, you know, maybe have an athletic background, but have never played rugby before, or even people just coming off the couch, like me, you know, I had a little bit of rugby experience, but last fall, I was basically just coming off the couch.
“It’s been amazing to see, you know, how we come together as a team around those new guys, and really teach the game to them. And that’s really kind of our thing is, we want to grow the sport,” Brown said.
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Chris Graham
