Rugby team out for two games; Team suspended after player streaked at tournament
Rugby players don’t have to wear a lot of pads – but apparently they do have to wear shorts.
Members of USU’s rugby team found out the hard way that streaking wasn’t the best way to celebrate a win when the team was suspended after a USU alumnus called the school and complained when a member of the team streaked at a rugby tournament in St. George Saturday, Feb. 18.
Originally the team was suspended for the rest of the season, but the team met with Juan Franco, vice president of Student Services, to appeal the decision.
“The team will be suspended for two games (specifically the games against UVSC and the Univ. of Utah) and be placed on probation for the rest of this season and the 06-07 season,” Franco said in an e-mail Tuesday. “The player guilty of the indiscretion will be suspended for the rest of this season. The team will also be asked to help in ensuring that all Club Sport participants be aware of the appropriate behavior when representing USU.”
The team’s president Dave McConnel said the team appealed the suspension for several reasons. Two of these were the fact that the team felt the punishment was more severe than the crime and that the rugby team had a good chance to compete nationally this season.
“We know what we did was wrong. [But] we knew we had a good chance of going to naionals and we didn’t want that taken away from us,” McConnel said. “We realized we were going to lose something we all put a lot into and it meant a lot more to us than an old tradition.”
It is a tradition in rugby around the world that when a player scores his first try the team members gather in the middle of the field and the player that scored takes off all his clothes and runs to the goal post and back to the middle of the field. It’s called a zulu. However, McConnel said players in Utah usually don’t go quite that far – keeping at least their underwear on when they celebrate the score.
But that wasn’t what happened at the St. George tournament when new player Micah Platt, who had learned about a zulu from friends back home, streaked after the game. An alumnus attending the game called Utah State and complained about it. At that time Assistant Director of Campus Recreation Scott Wamsley made the decision to suspend the rugby team for the rest of the season.
The was part of the reason McConnel said the team was appealing the suspension. Normally when a team does something wrong it goes through the Student Club and Activities Board (SCAB), made up of all the club presidents on campus, and a decision would be made as to the punishment.
“I think if it was another team it would have been handled another way,” McConnel said. “I felt we had that same right. It was taken completely over our heads … the severist punishment they could come up with.”
But in the club handbook given to the president’s of each club, it says that the club sports director has the right to take action without going through SCAB.
“I do think they need more than just a slap on the wrist,” Wamsley said. “The team has done this before. They were reprimanded once before about 14-15 months ago. And now they do it again.”
Wamsley said it was a very tough situation but he felt he made the right decision. In the club handbook it states “as club members you are responsible for the actions of your teammates which affect the entire program. Please take the responsibility to put pressure on individuals to conform to this code of conduct so the entire club does not suffer from the actions of one or two club members. Remember, you are a team.”
Last time it happened, the team was put on probation, something this year’s club presidency said they knew nothing about. Wamsley said he had been told last year’s rugby club president had passed on the message.
But even members of SCAB said they hadn’t heard of it before.
“I didn’t know they were on probation for any incident before,” SCAB president Kyle Liljenquist said. “That needs to be something that needs to go through. The six players that were there [the first time the team had gotten in trouble for streaking] should have said ‘We can’t do this we already got in trouble with this before.'”
When this happened before Platt said the teams and the offending players got a one-game suspension, so he said he thinks the punishment this time around is a little harsh. If he could go back, Platt said he wouldn’t have made the same decisions.
“[The zulu] is one of the biggest traditions in rugby,” Platt said. “I would have done it again if I had known what was going to happen … but I would have done it with underwear.”
-aedmunds@cc.usu.edu