Albertus Magnus Student Plays Rough

Albertus Magnus High School student Corinne Heavner has been playing organized rugby since she was in second grade, starting out with flag rugby before moving on to the tackle version of the sport when she was 13. But when she earned a spot on the United States’ Experimental Under-17 Team, she found herself in an unfamiliar position.

Heavner had traveled to Wisconsin last summer for the open tryout, where she was one of the 23 young women who got a spot on the team. In November, she went to California for a week to bond with her new teammates before the team’s two games that weekend.

Heavner had played almost every forward position before, so she expected to play one of these familiar positions that weekend. But after not playing in the first game, one of her coaches took her aside the day of the second game and told her she would be playing hooker, a forward position she had never played before.

“I was so surprised,” Heavner said of her reaction when she found out about the position change. “I asked [the coach], ‘I hope you know that I’ve never played hooker in my life,’ and she was like, ‘That’s all right because you’re going to play it today.’ […] She pulled me aside [the day of the game] […] and we practiced it for fifteen minutes, and then I went back to practice.”

Hookers are responsible for kicking the ball out during a scrum, which is when players on both teams lock arms and engage with each other to compete for the ball after a stoppage of play.

“It’s hard because you have to time the ball, […] the time that your foot goes out, [and] you’re doing all this stuff while you’re binding on to your other players,” Heavner said of the hooker position. “You’re not touching the ground, and you have to think, ‘Where’s the ball? Can I hook the ball? What time do I need to put my foot out?’”

Heavner, who lives in Pomona, played in the first half before sitting out the second half of the game with an injury, and the experience could help bring her one step closer to joining the women’s national rugby team when she gets older. Two of the coaches for the National Under-20 Team were at the U-17 Team practices to help prepare Heavner and her teammates for future national competitions.

“My goal is to make the Under-20 [team], and making this [Under-17] team helped me a lot, because I know the coaches now,” Heavner said.

Heavner first got into rugby thanks to her father, Gary Lee Heavner, who took her to his semi-pro games with the Old Blue Rugby Football Club before she was even old enough to play tackle rugby.

The elder Heavner played for the Old Blue Rugby Football Club semi-pro team, one of the top rugby teams in the country, for 15 years. He is currently a coach for his daughter’s club team, New York Rugby Club Girls Under-19, as well as for the Metropolitan New York Rugby Football Union Girls Under-19 Team, which is made up of club players from parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and which Corinne is also a member of.

He also serves as the president of the Northeast Rugby Union, the governing body for rugby in the northeastern section of the country.

“She always came with me to watch me play," Gary Lee Heavner said. "I really wasn’t aware that she was watching, but she must have picked it up, because […] she picked it up pretty quickly. […] I didn’t expect her to [pick up the sport], but I was always kind of secretly hoping.”

Some parents may worry about getting their children involved in a contact sport. But Gary Lee Heavner notes that rugby players have to tackle safely, which in turn prevents serious injury.

“Even though it’s full contact, because there’s no pads and helmets, people have to tackle safely, which means you hit someone as hard as you can, but with your shoulder into their gut or their thigh,” he said. “So even though  you might get bruised and banged a little bit you’re not going to come up with a concussion usually. […] Rugby players are the best tacklers of any sport in the world.”

Besides her father’s coaching, the younger Heavner feels her background in soccer has also helped her improve as a rugby player. She has been playing soccer since she was around 4 years old, which in turn helped her get used to a team atmosphere.

"My [club] team, when you start rugby, it’s all city kids, they’ve never played a sport before, they’ve never had team experiences, […] but I had been playing two sports," Corinne Heavner said. "I knew how to act as a team, [and] I already had some physical skills […]. And there’s a lot of kicking in rugby, and because of soccer I’m a really good kicker.”

But no matter how successful she is in the sport, she knows she will always have more to learn.

“There’s no point that you’re the best; you can always keep getting better, and you can never fully understand the game. You’re always learning new things,” Corinne Heavner said.