Carmel HS started off strong in Rugby Indiana’s fall season, and newcomer Cassidy Phillips has thrown herself into this new challenge and quickly become a big part of he team’s success. 

Despite being quite new to the sport, Phillips has emerged as a co-captain and the team’s scrumhalf, a remarkable rise in such a short time.

“I got involved with rugby through my roller derby team,” explained Phillips, who is obviously not put off by the physical aspects of rugby if she plays roller derby. “My derby coach made a passing comment about how she thought I would be good at rugby and the next day there were a few girls talking about it in school so I reached out and here I am.”

Those girls were co-captains of the school team, so she picked the right people to ask. Perhaps the one disappointment so far has been that it’s just touch rugby for now. We get the feeling Phillips is itching to make a tackle. But the positive is that she has been able to learn more about the flow of the game this fall. They slotted her in as the halfback on the 7s team and it’s been going well.

Rugby In The Time Of COVID

“Our team has been doing a fantastic job of having us be active despite COVID,” said Phillips. “So practice might be different but our coaches are still making it a lot of fun and the type of work they have us doing makes me feel stronger and more confident. I was thrilled when I heard that we would be able to play this fall. Many of us expected the season to be canceled altogether.”

Phillips was also worried on a personal about playing. Her mother has severe asthma, making her high risk for complications should she contract COVID-19. But the way the Rugby Indiana teams have approached return-to-play put her mind at ease.

“We were very concerned, but Rugby Indiana and the Carmel teams have done a fantastic job putting precautions in place,” she said. 

Missing The Tackling

So now they are playing, and while Phillips said a lot of the players were frustrated to see tackling taken out of the equation, it has forced them to look at the game differently.

“Personally I feel the drawbacks of playing touch a lot,” she said. “I don't feel like I am well suited to this style of play as I am short, stocky, and not very fast. But, those also are benefits. Playing touch is really pushing me in areas like speed and footwork, areas I may not have focused on during a tackle season. It is also giving us insight for how to set up our smaller faster players to be able to score and this will definitely help if we do tackle in the spring as the Carmel team tends to be physically smaller than other schools.”

Staying On Her Toes

A tough, hard-nosed player, Phillips is ready to lay in some hits, but has been developing her passing nicely. Because teams are actually playing touch rugby league, there are some other aspects of play she is forced to work on.(In Rugby League, when you are tackled, the defensive team instantly retreats five meters, and the tackled player gets up and rolls the ball back to the halfback to restart play.)

“When playing touch, speed is not just important for the girls going to score. With rules where you need to back up five meters after a touch, it is really pushing endurance and footwork,” she said.

Next up for Phillips? Graduation in the spring (hopefully, she said, after a 15s tackle season) and then she wants to go to university in Germany to study linguistics and become an interpreter with a focus on Arabic. Seems she’s going to throw herself fully into that plan, too.