Our kids are changing, sort of

Rob Price

When our daughter started her freshman year of college a couple months ago, I wondered what sort of changes she would go through as a young, excited, new college student.

Would she go radical, get a tattoo, pierce her nose in three different places? Or would she decide economics is a really interesting course of study? "I've decided to become an investment banker," I imagined her announcing during the October Parents' Weekend.

Instead, she told us she had joined the Bard College women's rugby team.

This is more surprising than anything I imagined. Through most of her life, Lora has regarded hangnails as medical emergencies. A blister on her foot would warrant daily press releases, prompting me on one occasion to remark: "I hope you never get drafted."

"Are you aware," I asked when she told us she had joined the rugby team, "that you could get your head kicked off?" I pointed out other difficult issues: the fact that catching a ball may be part of the game. And running is involved. I have never seen Lora run an entire mile without breaking into a limp. For that matter, I have never seen her catch a ball.

All the same, in the spirit of parental enthusiasm, my wife and I drove down to the lower Hudson Valley last weekend to watch the Bard women's rugby team in action. We had prepared ourselves for the match by studying the bizarre vocabulary of rugby, which has words like "scrum," and "ruck" and "mauling."

"I'm in the scrum," Lora told us over the phone.

Here, in general is what a scrum is: At the referee's signal, eight players on each team line up facing each other, then stuff their heads into each other's armpits, then shove back and forth, while someone rolls a rugby ball between the two lines. Eventually, the ball pops out, and someone picks it up and starts running until someone else kicks their head off.

My wife and I watched our daughter scrum, which involved a lot of unearthly growling sounds emanating from the center of each scrum. It surprised me that my daughter apparently had learned how to growl in her first two months of college.

Then, suddenly, the rugby ball was flying through the air, and my daughter actually caught it. This was a shocking enough development; what followed immediately afterwards almost knocked me over: The sight of my daughter running straight towards a crowd of opposing players roaring at the top of her lungs. It reminded me of some scene out of "Braveheart." Within seconds, a pile of bodies formed on the field with legs kicking and arms flailing. Then the ball popped out, and someone picked it up and took off running. Lora climbed out of the pile-up and took off in hot pursuit. As she passed us, she yelled, "I'm gonna kick her head off!"

I turned to her coach, a man all the team members call Moody. "What have you done with my daughter, Moody?" I said.

"She's playing a great game!" Moody said.

The great game continued in more or less the same spirit, with many more growling scrums and roaring rucks and mauls. Suddenly it was over, and to my great delight and surprise, the Bard women had accumulated more points than the team from the other college - a place, I think, called Mordor. This meant, someone explained to me, that Bard had won!

We watched one Bard player limp off the field holding her arm as if it were broken. There were many bloody knees and elbows, and Lora was massaging a thickening index finger, wondering if it was broken. Here's the update: She went to the hospital for an X-ray: a bad sprain. She is wearing a sprint.

Now we get daily e-mails on the status of the stoved finger. We also get messages describing scrapes and bruises to the knees and elbows. Our daughter alleges she has been doing push-ups on fields littered with broken glass. In other words, rugby aside, she is very much her old self, fussing about scrapes and blisters.

But I don't tease her about it anymore. I'm afraid she might kick my head off.