Origins
The Williams Rugby Football Club (WRFC) was founded in the spring of 1959 by David Coughlin `61. He and a classmate had spent a year abroad in Britain and were inspired to create a rugby club at Williams. A few incoming freshman had also played rugby while studying in England in an ESU program. With that core of five players, Coughlin then recruited another dozen players to flesh out the side. The athletic department loosely supported the club in small ways by letting them use the varsity lacrosse field and giving the team old JV football practice jerseys, which were converted into game jerseys. The team was mostly supported financially and spiritually by its first coach, Peter Pearson, a Williams community member who had played for the Huddersfield RFC in England. The following fall, the WRFC was admitted to the Eastern Rugby Union (ERU) and won the ERU Championship in 1960 with a 5-0-1 record. The team really took off in 1961 when it went on tour to England, where Coughlin and Pearson designed the WRFC crest and decided upon the team’s colors, claret and gold, which were borrowed from Pearson’s old team, the Huddersfield RFC.
Read more about this topic: Williams College Rugby Football
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)