History of UNCRFC

Getting new players and teaching them how to play was hard considering that most of the guys had never actually seen a proper rugby game. During the late 60’s the Club would be able to get 16 mm films of matches played by the New Zealand All Blacks from the New Zealand Embassy. The Club held recruiting evenings in the new Student Union and later in the New Establishment which became the social home for the club from 1978 until it closed and was supplanted by He’s Not Here in 1972.

In the spring of 1969 the Club took its first tour and the first of several to the Bahamas. Dour Sharer was the President and managed to get 25 players into Nassau for a three-game series. UNC beat the Nassau City team then lost to Baillou and the New Providence side. Carolina won a more or less informal match against Wesleyan played on the old Eastern Parade ground in Nassau. The pitch was interesting because one of the corner flags was actually placed in the roadway running beside the field and you were as likely to be run over by a truck or motorcycle as be tackled by the opposition. The tour was remarkable for the loss of our Lillywhite’s kit. After the Nassau City match we found the jerseys burning in a pile behind our hotel, set ablaze by an angry opposition member, it was political opposition to the Nassau City Club, however and the guys who burned the jerseys thought they were getting back at the locals.

By 1970 the club had acquired a reputation as one of the best college teams in the south, we had beaten the University of Virginia every time we played them, N.C. State was struggling, we had beaten Richmond, Atlanta, Norfolk and new clubs from Maryland and Pennsylvania but we had great difficulty beating Duke losing 8 of 9 matches with them during 1966-1971. They were led by Bill Harvey, the wrestling coach at Duke and an intense player who went by the moniker of "the gray ghost". Duke always managed to find a way to win until the fall of 1971 when the tide turned and Carolina humiliated them 33-0 in Carrboro. The Club had been banished from the campus because a highly recruited running back from the football team quit to play rugby. Doug David was a brilliant runner and tackler and was one reason for the club’s success at the time but at the cost of on-campus spectators. His defection was met by a ban on our use of on campus fields by Bill Dooley, the football coach. So we practiced on the Lincoln School field and played matches on the Lion’s Club field in Carrboro.

In the spring of 1968, Carolina began a long tradition of hosting touring teams from the northeast in the early part of the year. Teams would come south looking for unfrozen fields and early matches and Chapel Hill was a nice, warm stopover. Old Blue of New York, the best team in the U.S. came that year and barely won 6-3 in a match played on the Lions Club baseball field in Carrboro, now the site of an apartment complex. Carolina played Princeton the next year and has entertained Harvard, Middlebury, New Hampshire, Maryland, Army, the University of Toronto, and Toronto Irish among others.

In 1969 the club traveled to Norfolk for the Tidewater Cup and beat Wesleyan and the Norfolk Neptunes to capture the engraved trophy. During the celebratory ride through the streets of Norfolk headed to the party, the Cup, which was being triumphally displayed to the city out a car window blew out of the captain’s hand and was run over by a large truck. After that the tournament was renamed the Tidewater Plate.

At this time, Tom Ricketts was club President and the team was led on the field by Colin Jeffcoat, a graduate student from New Zealand and the 8th man. Colin was one of the great captains, he never raised his voice and he was never not close to the ball, a true Kiwi. Ben Porter was the fly half during the early 70s and was one of the best we’ve ever had. He was joined by what was probably the finest backline to play together in Chapel Hill, Joe Patterson at scrum half, Porter, Doug Roeser and Bob Vaughn at center, Johnathan Bender on one wing and a very young Tom Parks on the other. Vaughn went on to play for the Midwest Rugby Union and got a cap for the United States at center playing against South Africa in a weird match where spectators were banned due to the threats of violence. In the summer of 1969, Chapel Hill was the host for the North-South match, which was then the way the Eastern Rugby Union side was selected. Only one UNC player was invited to play, Ricketts, and he dropped out to go on a study tour of the Soviet Union. UNC didn't break into the ERU side until the early 80s despite having real talent.