Senior finds niche with rugby club

The ball lay on the field in front of her. Time on the clock rapidly ticked away with less than two minutes remaining in the game.

Never had Tyra McGrady and her teammates for the U.S. National U-20 rugby team — or any past members of the team in its history — beaten Wales.

There were four defenders blocking her path, but her goal wasn’t to get past them, it was to go beyond them.

***

Senior year of high school meant choices — the choice of which college to attend, the choice to continue athletics or give up on the glory days, the choice of a future.

For her entire youth, McGrady was a soccer player. Quick on her feet, she blazed the across the turf. But McGrady lacked foot skills.

So when the time came to choose a college, she chose whether or not she wanted to continue playing.

“I wanted to do something in college,” McGrady said after the idea of playing collegiate soccer fell through.

Since she was 4, the IU senior had kicked around a soccer ball. She even spent some time in gymnastics. But when she came to IU, McGrady found a new game to play on a grass field: rugby.

McGrady has spent some childhood years on the sideline of her older brother’s rugby games, but the 10-year age difference caused her to be uninterested during his prime years of playing. After the elder McGrady failed to convert his little brother from a football to a rugby player, he turned to his sister.

“He basically forced me to try rugby at IU,” McGrady said. “I was terrified. I had no idea. But now I love it. I couldn’t imagine not playing.”

When McGrady first stepped on the field to play with the IU Redstorm, the women’s club rugby team, she knew nothing about rugby.

Like most schools across the nation, neither of IU’s rugby teams have been granted varsity status. Collegiate rugby around the U.S. is currently under a three-year transition into conference-based competition to try to provide a better structure for college rugby.

Now, she laughs as she looks back at her three-year journey that took her from unknown to All-American.

She might not have known that rugby players maul, but not in the same way tigers do, and that a dummy pass was actually an act of deceit, but she quickly learned.

After her freshman season, McGrady was named a second-team All-America selection by USA Rugby; the honor made her the first All-American in the program’s 14-year history.

Two more seasons of practices and games with the club team, as well as conditioning with a private trainer three days a week, brought the exercise science major two first-team All-America recognitions.

“I just love how ruby is so different than any other sport,” McGrady said. “I can look at other sports and just pick out a million reasons why rugby is so much better. I love the people mostly. There’s a stereotype that soccer players are mean and catty and cheerleaders are girly, but with rugby players, it’s that they’re so down to earth.”

The IU team made it to the Sweet 16 of the national tournament in both 2007 and 2008. The team ended its 2010 campaign at 8-3.

“She’s just a natural,” senior teammate Rikke Fulkerson said. “She’s really, really fast, but she also worked at it. From our freshman year, she just started lifting weights and training.

“She gained at least 30 pounds in muscle from our freshman year.”

In the last few years, McGrady undoubtedly has transformed into a rugby player, and although she said her brother sparked her interest in the sport, she said her
Redstorm coach, Vaughn Mitchell, and his guidance is the reason she still plays today.

“She started off not really understanding the game to now really understanding the game of rugby and being a really good player,” Mitchell said. “She’s grown to be one of the better players in the country.”

***

The ball sits just a few inches from McGrady.

Her experience from the U-20 national team that played in South Africa, as well as her time with regional teams, all-star Midwest teams and a USA Sevens team, helped her to this moment.

She hunches her back as she runs and scoops up the ball. Seconds of time waste away as she runs.

While there’s no intense money-making future in rugby, McGrady has already decided that once she graduates, she wants to move to Chicago and join the Chicago North Shore team, a team that finished third in this year’s DI Women’s Club tournament.

She also was recently invited to the 2011 Elite Trials Camp for the Women’s High Performance Program, which develops rugby players for the U.S. Olympic team.

McGrady runs for a breakaway, beating four tackles. She sprints down the field and is taken down, but not before she crosses the goal line.

She scores the winning try, and her squad beats Wales for the first time in U-20 national team history.

“My heart still races,” McGrady said.

She’s recently watched the highlight clip of the game on YouTube.

“Whatever happens, I want to play rugby as long as I can,” she said. “I want to play rugby until my body breaks. That’s my plan.”