For an ex-high school and college rugby player like me, this is great news: The N.C. State Rugby Club has won the North Carolina state championship. Even better, they did this by beating perennial NC rugby powerhouse UNC, who led them at halftime per a fine article in The Technician (linked below).
It’s interesting – and gratifying – that much of the athletic success at N.C. State of late comes from the ranks of club sports teams. Our hockey club appears to be tearing up the ice and our bass fishing club team came home with the championship in that sport.
Funny thing: we often hear excuse-mongering from the Department of Athletics that our often woeful non-revenue teams would be competitive if they had “better facilities,â€? no matter that glitzed-up Carter-Finley is known as “Carter Friendlyâ€? in the ACC (and I’ll let you guess why). Give us better soccer fields, they say, and our teams won’t end up seeded on the bottom in both the men’s and women’s tournaments.
The club teams, though, win without fancy facilities. The rugby club, again down at the half against UNC, manned up and beat the Smurfs with pure determination and guts. They didn’t whine that UNC Rugby is classified as Division I, per The Technician, and State is officially a Division II club. They just toughed it up and won the game. The bass fishing club team likewise just went out and fished better than everybody else – and came home with the championship. No excuses about partial qualifiers or facilities there, either. And hockey? Hell, I don’t think we even have a rink for them.
And do you know what the best – or, given this is a Cardiff Giant column, worst – thing about the rugby victory is? According to The Technician, UNC Rugby gets $40,000 per year in financial support from the university. N.C. State rugby, the new state champions, received a whopping $1500 this year from Campus Recreation.
“Gol-ol-olee, Sergeant! That’s less than ten percent of what UNC gets!”
Now again, our rugby players didn’t complain about this. But isn’t it pathetic that our school, which pays through the nose for inept varsity teams in sports such as, well, volleyball, can’t find a way to provide its successful club rugby team with, say, TEN percent of the funding UNC gives its team? Winning despite facilities is one thing. Absolute financial abandonment is quite the other. This disparity in resources is embarrassing and absurd. One only wonders what the disparity is in other club sports.
Surely our state champions, and our other winning club teams, deserve better than this.
