Harvard Rugby Football Club Takes Europe

This spring break, the Harvard Rugby Football Club travelled across the pond for a tour of southern Europe. The trip—which included stops in Toulouse, France, and Barcelona, Spain—allowed the team to train and play with leading European leagues, exploring the world of rugby outside the United States.

The trip came in the midst of the club’s spring “sevens” season, where they are working towards securing a bid for the Collegiate Rugby Championship nationals. Seven-a-side rugby, or “sevens,” is a fast-paced version of the game involving seven players per team and two seven-minute halves for a total of 14 minutes of game time. The HRFC team plays sevens during their spring season, while the fall is dedicated to rugby union, or 15s—a version of the game featuring 15 players per team and 80-minute games. 

The club is familiar with travel. “We were in Houston a couple weeks ago,” HRFC president Tinaye Ngorima ’27 shared. “Last year, we went down to Indiana to Notre Dame to play a tournament. We played in Bermuda as well.” 

What made the European trip unique, however, was that the team was not travelling solely to compete in a tournament. “We also want to go to a place where our players will be able to have that kind of cultural experience as well, and be able to experience something new,” Ngorima said. A tour where games did not officially count towards the team’s season standings gave the men the opportunity to try new things and build connections with rugby players from across the world.

Despite its growing popularity, rugby is still a relatively niche sport in the United States. The sport has seen a boom in popularity in the last decade, likely supported by the founding of the first North American men’s professional league in 2017 and the women’s equivalent in 2024. But in parts of the world like Europe, South Africa, and Oceania, rugby consistently commands the spotlight. This tour gave the team the opportunity to experience rugby in places where it is the most popular sport. In the south of France, “rugby is the number one thing there. It’s in their culture, it’s in their veins,” Ngorima explained. The local passion for the sport made Toulouse an obvious destination for the trip. As for Barcelona, Ngorima explained, “Rugby is still very big there, but it really satisfied that kind of cultural immersion part of the tour.”

Upon landing in Barcelona, the team boarded the bus to Toulouse and wasted no time getting straight to rugby. “We arrived late on Friday into Toulouse, and then Saturday we were playing,” Ngorima shared. Their first game was against the University of Toulouse’s rugby union team, which operates similarly to a club sport at Harvard, open to all students and staff. “It was pretty much one day on for rugby, one day off,” Ngorima added.

Their arrival coincided with France’s victory over England in the final of the Six Nations Championship, one of the biggest annual European rugby tournaments. After their game against the University of Toulouse, the team watched the final with the Frenchmen in Toulouse. “It was so awesome,” Ngorima recalled. “We see them all celebrating. There’s really a lot of passion for it.” Seeing the level of passion for rugby in this part of the world was a huge inspiration for the HRFC team members, who don’t always see that same recognition in the United States.

After a day of rest and sightseeing, the HRFC joined Stade Toulousain, one of France’s top 14 professional rugby teams, for a training session. “Everywhere different plays different rugby,” Ngorima explained, so this training session provided insight into gameplay strategies unique to Toulouse. “What the guys really took away was that the French system is all about free-flowing, flat, fast rugby.” 

As opposed to many other parts of the world, where a big part of the game involves rucking—a form of contact formed between opposing teams after the player holding the ball has been tackled—Stade Toulousain attempts to keep the ball from ever touching the ground. “If you get tackled, that’s a bad thing. You want to keep the ball alive,” Ngorima said. The men plan to bring this strategy back to Cambridge and find ways to incorporate it into their own gameplay systems.

The team then boarded the bus to Barcelona. “We kept the same pace of one day on from training and from rugby, and then one day off to see the sights. We played our final game on Friday in a small town called Sitges, just south of Barcelona,” Ngorima recalls.

The hospitality that the HRFC received from the rugby club in Sitges eased the travel for the whole team. “We played against each other, and they opened their doors super well. They put a barbecue together for us. Afterwards, we all sat around, had a barbecue, got a few drinks, and really enjoyed that kind of community amongst ourselves.”

The trip concluded by backtracking to Perpignan, France, to watch professional European rugby in action. “We went to go watch one of the top 14 French rugby matches, which was, again, another great experience,” Ngorima shared. Watching a neck-and-neck game between two of France’s top professional teams exposed the men to an elite level of gameplay accompanied by a stadium packed with cheering fans.

Landing back in Cambridge, the team now has its sights set on qualifying for its third consecutive national sevens championship. The process of securing their nationals bid, explained Ngorima, involves competing in several tournaments across the Northeast. “The goal is to either qualify through one of those tournaments directly by winning those tournaments, or build enough of a résumé to earn an at-large bid.” The session with Stade Toulousain and their games against some of Europe’s best university teams have undoubtedly equipped them with new skills to ensure their success as they conclude their spring season.

“Rugby really is a beautiful game in the sense that it’s so global and it’s so worldwide,” Ngorima concluded. “You can walk in anywhere, and they’ll open the doors for you, just based off that connection, that shared passion for the game of rugby.” 

The trip was, without a doubt, an opportunity for the HRFC to improve their gameplay by playing with and against experienced European teams. Even more than that, though, this trip showed the team a world in which rugby is not an underground sport but a cultural phenomenon. Despite language barriers and cultural differences, the HRFC was welcomed with open arms by rugby teams across Europe. The team was able to imagine a future where rugby is elevated in the United States to a similar level to that which they witnessed on their international tour. 

Lucy Duncan ’28 (lduncan@college.harvard.edu) writes Sports for the “Independent.”