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The U.S. women's rugby team made waves last summer when they won their first Olympic medal. This spring, players and fans hope to build on that momentum with the inaugural season of U.S. pro women's rugby. WBUR's Maddie Browning checked out a practice session with Boston's new team.
(CROSSTALK)
MADDIE BROWNING, BYLINE: The Boston Banshees take over a turf field for late-night practice. Their coach eyes players as they complete drills. It's only a week before their first professional game.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Go.
UNIDENTIFIED RUGBY PLAYERS: (Inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Bind.
UNIDENTIFIED RUGBY PLAYERS: Squeeze.
BROWNING: Players assemble into a scrum. They lock arms and push against the other team to claim possession of the ball.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Inaudible).
(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLE)
BROWNING: Rugby is like a mix of American football and soccer. It's an aggressive contact sport with limited padding. Thirty-three-year-old player Catie Benson returned to the States to join the Banshees after playing pro in Manchester, England. She's excited to finally play closer to home.
CATIE BENSON: I think it's absolutely amazing to have the sport at this level and people get to see us play. It's just really exciting. And it's, like, a really exciting time to, like, grow in women's rugby.
BROWNING: The Boston Banshees are 1 of 6 teams across the country in Women's Elite Rugby. Only four weeks into training, coach Kittery Ruiz says Boston is already embracing its new team.
KITTERY RUIZ: There's a huge rugby community in Boston in general. You know, there's multiple men's teams, multiple women's teams, high school teams, college teams. And so that fan base is sort of already set in place because they are rugby fans, they're rugby people.
BROWNING: Ruiz used to coach one of Boston's amateur women's rugby teams. She says it's crucial for a league like this to have consistent competitive games.
RUIZ: Success for me is, you know, a successful, good showing where we have a good platform to build on in the future years; it's, you know, good, fast-paced, hard-hitting rugby that brings fans in that have never seen rugby before, that want to learn what it's about.
BROWNING: Jackie Finlan started a publication called The Rugby Breakdown. She says fans have to band together to support teams in person.
JACKIE FINLAN: We got to organize carpools. We have to do this big shift to get out there and physically represent in the stadiums. But I think, yeah, if you see people making an effort, that will be a win for year one.
BROWNING: Women's Elite Rugby cofounder Katherine Aversano says this season's games will be played in stadiums of between 1,500 to 5,000 seats. The league saw how beneficial free streaming was for the WNBA. They will be following in their footsteps this year by streaming every match.
KATHERINE AVERSANO: The reality is, we could have waited a couple years to do this, but by then, if we really want to develop a high-quality level of rugby in the United States that ends up being showcased for the World Cup, we need to get started now.
BROWNING: Twenty-eight-year-old player Emma Santosuosso says it's a relief to be paid to play on the team.
EMMA SANTOSUOSSO: Coming from a semiprofessional league where we paid for all of our travel, we paid to play on the team and just, like, doing all the admin stuff, being able to just play rugby and also not have to pay to play rugby and get to travel across the country with your team, it's really exciting.
BROWNING: Aversano says the league realizes it could take a couple years to turn a profit, and they are ready for that.
For NPR News, I'm Maddie Browning in Boston.
(SOUNDBITE OF GWEN STEFANI SONG, "HOLLABACK GIRL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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