OUR RUGBY TEAM
-THE NUCLEUS OF IT PRACTICING DAILY ON THE CAMPUS.-
The Campus has taken on a home like look this past week. Every afternoon has seen some of our canvas backed Rugby players tossing the ball back and forth or trying to kick goals. It has been cold and raw, but the spectators have had many a laugh as the boys would form an invincible V and split the wind with it, but if they have had nothing but the wind to buck against, they have at least been learning to stand shoulder to shoulder. And they are doing good work, these few who are back getting in condition by tossing the ball, tackling, breaking the line, trying the V or the gridiron, and learning the twist that gave Ames of Princeton his celebrated nick-name of “Snake Ames.”
The boys are working under Malley, who has brought back a trunk full of new tricks and has already began to teach his men a few of them. Abbott, Trainer, Hatch, DePont, Rathbone, Dygert, McAllister, Stone and Chadbourne take them as naturally as any canvas-back does to water. Of course the boys are all “soft,” and short winded as yet, but if they follow the liner laid down by Captain Malley it will be soiled meat and sand that Cornell runs up against this year.
It does ones heart good to hear Captain Malley talk. If he does one half the things he wants to do, he will do double of anything that has ever been thought of here before, and there be a game at Buffalo this year that will be marked by sandy playing, and a much closer score than Cornell will look for. To begin with “Systematic Work” is to be the foundation of the Rugby eleven this year. At 4 P.M., every day, every man who wants to play on the teams must show up on the Campus. At 4:15 the players on the ground will be placed on the lines of the two teams – for it is Malley’s intention to play two teamsevery day – and the players will play in these positions the remainder of the day, the late comers taking any position that may be left when they get there. At 5:15 the teams will go to a bath-room to be placed probably in the basement of the Medical building. Here a douse and a rub and then to Prettyman’s where they will rest and discuss the plays of the afternoon while a supper is being prepared for them at a training table that Prettyman is to run for them. This will be run in the same way that the Eastern training tables are.
“Those who work shall play.” This comes pretty near being an Irish Bull, but Malley says that “It goes” and adds “I want at least fourteen new men this year, and I want the boys to come out and try for these positions. And when it comes to selecting the men who will go East this year, it is going to be a simple question of the twenty-two men who can and have been playing the best Rugby day by day. Twenty-two men will go East. The Harvard, Yale and Princeton players are all hard at work now, every man of them, and it is time that our boys were willing to do the same if they ever hope to down the Eastern team. And the fact is they’ve got to work if they play this year.”
Malley is very, very right, and every man who plays Rugby ought to come out, put his foot in the ball, and try for a position on the team. If you fail for the Varsity eleven there will still be the second eleven, all of whom will take the Eastern trip. Twenty-two men will go East.
In the way of material not already noticed Van Deventer, the Shermans, Haynes, VanInwagon, Glidder, Sunderland, Duffy, and Prettyman are expected to be here this year. For new material, Jewett, who played a rattling game as half-back for the High School eleven last year, enters ’94 lit. Ninety-four also gets Chadbourne, who played center on the Phillip’s Exeter Academy eleven last year, the eleven that made such a good showing against such college teams as Dartmouth, Amherst, and the Tech. Over in the law school they have Stone, a graduate of Swarthmore, ’89, who played full-back a portion of the time while there. The most that can be said of these new men now is that they bid fair with practice to be able to get onto one of the two teams.
