While sports like football, basketball, and soccer sweep the US for club sports, Saint A’s offers a wide variety of different sports outside the norm. One of the primest and oldest examples is rugby.
Rugby has been on the Hilltop for several decades, with a history dating back to the 1980s! Needless to say, rugby has become one of the staple clubs at Saint A’s. This past week, I got the opportunity to sit down with Stephen Mineo ‘25, the captain and president of the club.
Mineo has been a part of the team since his freshman year. When I asked about how he got into the sport, he said, “I started playing rugby my freshman year of high school, when I was 15 years old. I had never heard of the sport – never played it. It was actually my older brother who got me into the sport, because we wrestled together. I was gonna go do track and he goes, ‘No, come out and play rugby – you’ll love it,’ and I was like, ‘Okay I’ll give it a shot.’ I didn’t know what I was doing until I came out of my first practice, and I have been playing for years now. I owe that to my brother, because he’s the one who pushed me to come out and play and made me realize that I’m a lot stronger and a lot more capable than I think, and that is something that I’m eternally grateful for.”
Stephen has worked hard to give his team the best experience possible; he has even collaborated with Amoskeag Rugby Football Club in practicing with his team. The club has welcomed the Saint A’s rugby team with open arms.
I asked Mineo about Amoskeag helping with the team, and he said they have been “incredible”! He continued saying, “They’ve been a huge help, because they let me play with them on their A-side. Mainly because I have experience, and they let my guys play on their B-side. Their games play after the main match, which gets them experience, and then practices are Tuesdays/Thursdays, which is super flexible; they’re from six to eight. They pull the newcomers aside, teach them the basics, and then when they’re good enough, they can come in and join the team”.
Amoskeag and the Saint A’s rugby team have established a close relationship, which Stephen believes is one of the great things about rugby. Mineo said the community is “tight-knit” and that, “Rugby is the most beautiful sport in the world, because it’s a game where you can beat each other up for an hour and a half and then get some food, and you celebrate a good, hard fought match after. Rugby is beautiful in that way. One minute you’re in a hard fought match, the next you’re all sitting around enjoying the comradery.”
Rugby has one of the most tight-knit communities in sports. Sure, the winning aspect matters, but, at the same time, it doesn’t. At the end of the day, it’s about friendship and respect rather than rivalries and tension.
The typical match day is rather busy in rugby. Mineo says games typically start at 1:00 in the afternoon, and so he arrives at the field around 11:30. Once he gets to the field, the warmup goes as follows according to the Junior, “We get kitted up, get ready, stretch, get some water, and then we do our dynamic warm up. We split the players, we do backs and forwards, and they work on their own little plays. The backs are the quicker smaller guys – the playmakers, if you will. The forwards are the bigger, stronger guys who do all the hard, tough work. We do the warmups for 15 minutes, and then we come together for a team run which is where we go through our actual game plan and what we want to perform in the game. Then the match is ready to begin.”
While the details about the club rugby team are interesting, Mineo got candid about future plans and what he wants to do to keep this long running club going in the future. He said,” He hopes it continues to be a long lasting club with consistent numbers for players, because we can consistently have games on the weekends. It might not happen in my time here. But if I can just lay the groundwork for that. Even if it’s just a little bit of progress, then I can just make a little bit of progress to the point where we can get more numbers, and we can get more matches. I would love that. I would love nothing more than that.”
Stephen is committed to his guys and this team. It is his passion and honor to lead this club. If anyone is interested in potentially joining this club, you can contact [email protected]!
