‘Try Rugby,’ Say Bunce and Cleary of the Montauk R.C.
When he heard that the football program at East Hampton High School was folding — at least for the time being — Kevin Bunce, who coaches the Montauk Rugby Club’s junior players, asked the football coach, Joe McKee, if he wouldn’t talk up rugby as a “positive alternative.”
“These kids have an opportunity to make all their hard work in the past several weeks pay off,” Bunce said during a conversation at The Star this week. “You don’t want them staying at home and doing nothing — there are problems at the high school, with alcohol and drugs, everybody knows it, though nobody ever says anything about it. If we had a good turnout — they’d be surprised at what they could do — we could field a varsity 7s team that would play, like our jayvee team, in a tristate league this fall. And it’s not only the football players — there were cuts in soccer and boys volleyball too. They all should know we’re there for them. We’re not looking to be world-beaters, we just want to teach them a fun sport. Once they play it, they’ll love it.”
There were, he and Paul Cleary, one of Montauk’s former coaches, said, many things to recommend rugby. It was, to begin with, a safer contact sport than football (an assertion borne out, they said, by statistics), and a more democratic one. “Everyone gets to touch the ball,” said Cleary. “Anyone can score, everybody plays.” And the camaraderie that rugby inspired, they said, was exceptional.
“They say about rugby, ‘You don’t just play, you belong,’ ” Bunce said.
“I came here [from Ireland] 25 years ago. I wouldn’t have stayed if there hadn’t been a rugby team,” Cleary said. “It’s like a big old family, wherever you go. You can have fun all your life playing it.”
Moreover, rugby could open doors that might otherwise be closed, they said, to college and to international play. A half-dozen locals had played the sport throughout the world, said Bunce — Frank Bistrian, Chris Carney, Rob Balnis, John Glennon, and his nephew Mike Bunce Jr. among them.
As for college, Bunce said that given his and some of his fellow ruggers’ long tenures here — “I’ve been around Montauk rugby for 30 years, Rich [Brierley] has been around for 35 — we’re friends with a lot of the college coaches and rugby union administrators now, and they listen to us.”
Further, one couldn’t wish for a better coaching staff, what with the experience that Montauk Rugby Club members such as Cleary, he, Rich Brierley, Garth Wakeford, Gordon Trotter, and Carney, Balnis, and his nephew could offer.
“We’ve got 200 years of experience,” Bunce said with a hearty laugh.
Perhaps the downturn in football — he’d heard, he said, that Southampton’s football program was hurting too numbers-wise — would signal an upturn in Montauk rugby, which also needed some bolstering at the club level, said Bunce.
Ultimately, the two sports, he added, would reinforce rather than vie with each other. “The football players could play friendly games with us in the spring, and play football in the fall.”
Of one thing he was convinced: that the chances when it came to college recruitment lay heavily in rugby’s favor.
“When Jesus Barranco, who’s now at the State University at Albany, one of the leaders on the rugby club there, asked me a few years ago what he needed to do to play D-1 football, I said to him, ‘First, get in shape, two, forget about it. . . . If colleges are looking at them for football, I guarantee they’ll look at them for rugby.”
The jayvee team he mentioned had players on it from East Hampton (Kevin Bunce Jr., Nick Wyche, Daniel Ortiz, Nick Lombardo, “and a couple of others”), Mattituck, Shoreham-Wading River, Riverhead, and Babylon. The jayvee 7s season — and perhaps the varsity’s should a dozen sign on — is to begin with a tournament on Sept. 24.
“We’ll play five games a weekend for six weekends, and everyone will get to play. We’ll have unlimited subs, which is great. They will have had 90 minutes of rugby when they’re done. Any kid from the high school is welcome. We practice Tuesday and Thursday nights at Herrick Park at 6:30.”