Women’s Turf: Brown Turnaround

Wednesday May 14, 2008 in Magazine

 

 

By Stephanie Bruce

The Brown University Women’s Rugby team didn’t always enjoy the view from above. It took them 30 years to win the DI Northeast Championship, achieved in 2007 after an undefeated fall regular season. This year, on top of the eRugbyNews.com college rankings for most of this year, the team made it to the Final Four of this spring’s National Collegiate Championships (defeating West Chester and UC Davis) before losing 41-7 to a very strong Penn St. team in the semi-finals.

Head coach Kerrissa Heffernan, who joined Brown in 2003, has been the catalyst behind taking a middle-of-the-pack team to two consecutive Nationals. While that’s not necessarily unique—a lot of colleges can put together a few successful seasons thanks to a core of solid players, before that group graduates and rebuilding seasons ensue—Brown’s emergence has been the result of Heffernan’s coaching style. She continually contours her strategy to tap the caliber and work rate of her Ivy League students, thereby making the most of her athletes’ raw talent.

Although Heffernan helped coach at Radcliffe and Boston University during her playing years, it wasn’t until arriving at Brown that the former US Eagle dove into coaching with a purpose. “Brown’s the first time I thought about coaching as a practice,” she says, “and thought about it as innovative teaching and not just grabbing somebody else’s practice or just doing what I would do.”

The Associate Director of the school’s center for Public Policy, with an EdD (Educational Doctorate) degree in Curriculum Design, Heffernan studies and presents groundbreaking curricula from around the country.

“I get to paw around people’s worlds, find out what [different] professors are doing and why it’s significant and write about it.” This translates well to developing a plan for the “smart kids” whom she coaches. “I’ve been lucky to understand what’s unique about Brown and the way [the students] approach the game and how we can remain competitive, even in our lean years.”

At Brown, Heffernan realized that she wasn’t dealing with the average pool of student athletes. “[The players] are all over-achievers, so I can set high standards for fitness and work rate.” This work rate is crucial in developing strong decision-making in contact situations. “That goes a long way in college because you play a lot of teams that just aren’t that good in contact—they can’t focus because they’re not used to it. You can take players with less rugby skill and turn them into a pretty good team [because] you can work with their natural athleticism.”

While the Brown women possess a work rate beyond the typical college athlete, they’re not invincible and that’s where assistant coaches Kurt Teichert and Tom Dill come in handy. The extra sets of eyes facilitate player management for Heffernan and allow her to focus on the team’s game plan. Dill, a certified athletic trainer, keeps the women as healthy as possible.

“Tom checks up on injuries, and players are lined up an hour before practice getting taped and taken care of so I can do a lot harder contact in practice,” explains the grateful head coach. “It’s those little things that make you go from adequate to very good. If I were to lose Tom, you’d see our program take a huge nosedive because I’d go back to about a 25% attrition rate between the fall and spring.”

Once Heffernan conditions her athletes to a physical premium, the women’s natural curiosity into the cerebral side of the game emerges. “I think that Brown students want to understand the intricacies of the game,” says second row and scrum captain Keisha Carlson. This allows Heffernan to delve into the conceptual elements of the sport and allows the athletes to, as Heffernan says, “synthesize and apply knowledge, not just ingest it,” which provides a dialectic environment for learning.

“We can spend more time thinking about strategy and the best ways to be effective,” the coach continues. “They are not grinds though. They trust me and I appreciate that I can put up my hand, stop conversation and just ask them to trust repetition.” That said, “I revise much of our play based on player input—by the time they are seniors, they are smart players.”

The player-centric approach is a welcomed one for many athletes and one which Heffernan takes to heart. “I was a product of an intense D1 college track program with tough coaches who saw athletes as disposable—it was a demeaning experience.” Many curious or disillusioned athletes try rugby, are intrigued with the new challenge, and fall in love with the game. Without scholarships to tie athletes to their sport, varsity team coaches panic at the prospect of losing some of their best athletes to rugby, the case with Alex and Alecia Hartley, who were recruited for the Brown track team.

“They were fairly successful at track, for first-years, but they fell in love with rugby,” recalls Heffernan. “And then there was this horrible scene where varsity coaches were freaking out because they were going to leave. I just got my [butt]-kicked by the athletic department because they felt I recruited them, which I didn’t.” The twins stuck with rugby, having enjoyed success in both the Brown program and select-side pools; most recently being selected for the national U19 team.

Like the Hartley twins, hockey captain Emilie Bydwell has made room in her closet for a pair of boots. Bydwell sampled rugby during the off season, which is a trend with many varsity athletes, flourished in the backline and was named an All American center and most recently a US Eagle, travelling on the 2007 tour of England.

At first, this unnerved the hockey program, but as Bydwell won more rugby recognition, hockey began to put that in her bio and web info. “So this year Em talked to [the head coach] and got the okay to come back to hockey when rugby ended,” Heffernan says. “It cost her playing time with hockey, but she had gone from being a hockey player who also played rugby to a rugby player finishing out hockey.”

Bydwell and the Hartley twins are keys to Brown’s run at Nationals, but no one plays forever and Heffernan adjusts her coaching plan accordingly. “That’s one of the things I like and I hate about college coaching,” she says with a sigh. “I’m trying to simplify a plan and I’m trying each year to say these are the athletes in front of us. The kind of rugby we’re playing right now I love, but I know I won’t be able to play it when a certain number of these kids graduate and I’m going to have to come up with a whole new plan.”

Heffernan has been able to develop a slew of young talent alongside her seasoned players, so while the team will have a new look in the coming season, they will be able to draw on the ever-growing experience and knowledge of the younger crop of athletes.

Bydwell, and the other departing players, are confident the team can keep its current success going. “Kerri has an incredible vision for our team,” Bydwell says. “She is constantly pushing us out of our comfort zone so that we perform at our highest possible level. This Brown team has set a standard for our program and I think that this standard is going to be carried through in years to come by the young leaders on our team.”

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