Sullivan An All-Star On Rugby Field

By Andy Hutchison

She had played basketball and soccer, competed in track and field, and played a little powder puff football. This year, former Newtown High School athlete Kelley Sullivan decided to combine the skills of those sports and put them all to use on the rugby field.

“It’s a combination of a lot of different sports and skills,” said Sullivan, a sophomore at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-based Marist College, and first-year member of the school’s women’s rugby team. “It’s just different from any other sport I’ve played.”

It would seem Sullivan’s athleticism and experiences in other sports paid off in rugby. Sullivan had such a successful first campaign on the rugby field that she was selected out of hundreds athletes to play for the Northeast U-19 All-Star Team in Mission Viejo, Calif., on November 20 and 21 in the USA Rugby All-Star Championship Tournament.

The team was coached by Austin Hall of Norwich and Will Riddle of Army. The roster consisted of 23 women mostly from Army (9) and Norwich University (7), and others from Marist College (3), Syracuse University, University of Rhode Island, Stonehill College, and American International College.

The Northeast All-Star team beat Southern California 24-0 in heavy rains and, in the Tier 2 finals, beat the South team 22-12. With the win, the Northeast team will be moved up to Tier 1 next year.

“It was a really fun experience, meeting new girls and learning new playing styles,” said Sullivan, adding that it was a nice surprise to be selected.

Marist went undefeated at 5-0, knocking off Rutgers, Vassar, and New Paltz during the regular season (all teams nationally ranked in the top 25), outscoring opponents 114-29 along the way. The team was ranked as well as seventh in the nation for Division II schools. (Marist is actually a D-I team, but since rugby is a club sport it is recognized nationally as D-II). The team, coached by Marist alums Maren Millard and Danielle Hundt, lost in the MetNY semifinals to New Paltz.

Sullivan is a winger, occasionally plays outside center, and is one of Marist’s conversion kickers. She was recently elected vice president of the rugby club for the 2011 spring and fall season.

A 2009 NHS graduate, Sullivan played varsity soccer and ran track (indoor and outdoor) for the Nighthawks. She ran track at Marist for most of her freshman year before deciding to make a change and joining the rugby team.

She is planning to study abroad, in New Zealand, in her junior year and hopes to play rugby overseas as well.

“It’s such an amazing and interesting sport that was so exciting to learn. Globally it’s a very popular sport and its popularity is slowly growing in the United States, but unfortunately people, especially girls, are just uneducated when it comes to the sport. People assume that it is a dangerous sport where you have to be big to succeed, but there’s a position for anyone,” Sullivan said. Sullivan, who stands at 5-foot-9, added that the Marist team has girls who range in height from 4-foot-11 to 5-11.

Sullivan admits she was a little concerned about playing a sport in which there is so much physical contact. “Going into it I was scared about getting hurt because injuries are so common in female sports,” said Sullivan, adding that adding tackling into the mix, and the fact women’s rugby players wear only mouth guards — no padding or helmets — made it seem that much more likely injury could result. Sullivan said she learned that tackling in rugby is quite safe in that a defensive player has to go to the ground with the ball carrier she is tackling.

The sports takes a mental and physical toll on players since they have to bounce back from tackles and get back into the play immediately, Sullivan said, but she enjoys the challenge.

“I really encourage everyone to try it out. Most importantly, the team camaraderie is unlike any other team I’ve been part of before, and I find that rugby players from other schools tend to strongly agree with me,” Sullivan said. “It’s such a team sport on the field and off the field.”