Don’t forget your mouthguard

As soon as the mouthguards appear, I start to worry ... I’ve come along to Tuesday training with the women’s team from DTU Exiles Rugby.

Jon, the Welsh trainer, assures me that I can take part in tackling practice without a mouthguard. All I have to do is run head-on at full pace into the large, plastic-covered foam pads my team-mates are holding in front of them. It’s important to ensure that the point of impact is at hip height on the opponent, because that increases my chances of flattening her. Or so I am reliably informed. However, it’s quite tough to go barrelling into another person on purpose. Although the other players all seem to enjoy it.

“It’s essential that you learn to tackle properly. If you hesitate, that’s when you can get injured,” say my team mates.

A quick verbal survey reveals that pretty much everyone on the women’s team has felt the effects of a bad tackle: broken fingers, severe sprains, knee and ankle injuries and bent ribs are just some of the outcomes mentioned. One player has actually split an opponent’s eyebrow because the would-be tackler didn’t hold on tightly enough.

The training session takes place on the lawns in the first quadrant on Lyngby Campus, and all instruction is in English. This makes sense, because the trainer isn’t the only one who doesn’t speak Danish; rugby attracts a lot of players from other countries where it is a major sport.

The women’s team at DTU Exiles currently features 10 or 15 players from countries as diverse as Spain, Finland, the United States, Germany, France, the UK and the Netherlands. When the players chat during the water breaks at training, they do so in a mixture of English and Danish.

During training, we practice passing while running a variety of routes and patterns. Although we haven’t come to training to play an actual seven on seven match on this particular Tuesday, I do get a little taster anyway when we’re divided up into two teams of four and start battling to place the ball behind the opponents’ try line.

For safety’s sake, I stay out on the wing, a good distance from the pitched battle taking place in the middle of the pitch. I don’t really dare go all in without a mouthguard ...

		Becky Works for Microsoft. “I’ve been playing for over seven years. I grew up abroad, so it’s important to me to have an international circle of friends. There’s great team spirit in the club—both men’s and women’s teams—we’re really sociable and often get together off the pitch. In the sport itself, I most enjoy the tackling; there are also a lot of rules, so there’s always something new to learn. The hardest thing is to keep on attacking, even though one of your team mates might be lying injured on the pitch.”
Maria Exchange student from Spain, studying Mathematics. “I started playing when I arrived at DTU nine months ago. My team mates made me feel really welcome, and I love being around them. Rugby’s a lot of fun and a dynamic sport. There’s so much to keep track of, and you have to think really quickly on the pitch.”
		Signe Studying Electrotechnology. “I’ve been playing at DTU for three years, and I’ve been on the Danish national team for a year. There are more men than women on my study programme, so I wanted to play a sport where I could meet other women. I like the speed of rugby, both physical and mental aspects. You have to think fast and make quick decisions. It’s a good counterweight to my engineering studies, where we often have to sit and think for ages.”
Lisa Studying Mathematical Modelling and Computing. “I started playing rugby a year ago because it sounded like a fun sport. It’s also a sport where you can come in as an absolute novice—unlike many others, where people have often been playing since they were kids. I love the intensity and the sudden sprints. It’s fun when both teams go all-in on the pitch. It’s tough to control the ball—it’s oval so it doesn’t behave like ‘normal’ balls do.”