northern virginia women's rugby football club - NoVA Piranhas WRFC

the origin of
ROOKIE BEADS
(by Barb Lerch)
the
ROOKIE
REPORT
Tone Rawlings (now of the Stingers) spent quite a few summers as
piranha while still in college. She had rookie beads from her college
hanging on her car’s rear view mirror. As a coach I just thought this
was a fun way to show our appreciation to people who made it through
the gauntlet of playing season. So I got a few of my cohorts together at
the Quarter Deck for crabs and beer and we made the first rookie beads.
I want to say the first batch was given out at the end of a 7s season to
everyone who played. For sure the next batch was distributed to the
rookies right before the last game of the season which was a MD matrix
match. I remember all but 4 or so of our players were rookies and I
think I wanted to pass on some good luck or something. We didn’t come
close to winning the game - but it is the infamous game in which I made
the not so petite Thommie fly into the lawn chairs (In my defense, this
action was only done in retribution for their teams unnecessarily
brutal treatment of our rookies.)
Originally the beads were given out as a coach’s gift of appreciation
to her players - the first ones were a simple repeating pattern of Black,
Royal, Clear - and if you played 7s you got a purple bead and a fish
(we were still vixens on the 15s field back then.) After a few seasons this
became a rather time intensive chore and the beads were threaded in no
particular order in the car on the way to games and such. Then someone
came up with the brilliant idea of rookie moms (if it was me, I don’t
remember - but think it was more likely Lynette with her sorority
background) and rookie moms eventually took over the handing down of
the individually created creative beads to their rookies vs a handful of
people mass producing the same boring ones over and over again.
Northern Virginia Women’s Rugby Football Club Fall 2006 Newsletter THE ROOKIE REPORT EDITION 2: SEPTEMBER 2006
11