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THE SCHOOLBOYS KICK OFF the game
with their ritual chant, derived from a
Maori war dance called a haka. It begins
with a whispered call-and-response,
then builds to a group wail (hear it at
humboldt.edu/magazine).
The teams splay out across the
field and the game is on. The ball is a
tumbling blur as it flies from player to
player, making its way down the field
amid the mob of bodies. Here rugby’s
rhythms depart from the American
sports standard of time-outs and interruptions.
In rugby, there’s no break in
the action unless a penalty is called.
The schoolboys eventually beat the
old men in this contest, 12 to 10. Battered,
bruised but beaming, the Humboldt
players leave the field in a flurry
of handshakes and back-pats.
SIMON TRAPKUS IS A veteran of
Humboldt Rugby’s golden age, a period
in the 1980s and 1990s when the small
but spunky HSU team was known for
feisty play, both on and off the field.
Like many rugby players, Trapkus
had tried baseball, football, soccer –
even wrestling and track – but wasn’t
satisfied. It wasn’t until he fell in with
the “wrong” crowd that he found the
right way to go.
“I had some buddies, the kind you’d
expect to be rugby players – maverick,
outlaw types,” he says. They talked him
into trying rugby. “I didn’t think it was
going to be any fun,” he says. “It wasn’t
mainstream, but I went out and played,
and oh my gosh, it was fun. Once you’ve
played, you’re into it.”
His experience is common among
rugby players. “In one game I got to
kick, I got to catch, I got to pass, I got to
run and I got to tackle without having
to change position at all,” says veteran
player Pat Bellefeuille, now president of
the Humboldt Rugby Football Club. “I
went from one little specialized thing to
doing every single thing you could possibly
do on the field. It’s liberating.”
Bellefeuille invokes the two c-words
you hear a lot in talking to rugby players
– contact and camaraderie. “It’s a
contact sport, but at the same time it’s
a gentleman’s game,” he says. “It’s all
about the camaraderie between the
teams. It’s kind of a culture.”
That culture has flourished at HSU.
Trapkus heard about it from his high
school coaches. When he asked whether
he should go to Chico, Davis or HSU,
their sotto voce, insider-information
reply was, ‘Go to Humboldt State. That
is where the rugby tradition is thick.’
Founded in 1973, Humboldt men’s
rugby is a club team and was not affiliated
with a league for its first decade.
Only in 1984 did the team gain Division
I status (from USA Rugby, not
the NCAA, which does not officially
recognize rugby). Then it started taking
on powerhouse teams from UC Davis,
Berkeley, Chico State and St. Mary’s.
Humboldt’s close-knit team hit ’em
all hard and fast – and unexpectedly.
“They were wondering why Berkeley
was even playing Humboldt,” says Mike
Foget, an ’80s HSU rugby vet. In one
match with Berkeley, he recalls, the
Humboldt team lost the game while
scoring a monumental moral victory.
“They won, but the score didn’t tell the
story. We came out and played them
pretty close on their own field. They
were nervous.”
Experiences like that were frequent
and eventually propelled the Humboldt
team to the western regional playoffs.
Several team members earned national
prominence as All-Americans, including
players like Trapkus, Kevin Miske,
John Mitchell and Jim Morehouse.