Dakota Southworth

Southworth played rugby in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The Iowa HS league is a 7s only league—it’s basically an all-single-school league which gets kids playing quickly by having them play 7s and making the rules relatively simple. It’s been enormously successful, but it has its drawbacks, as players enter college programs unfamiliar with 15s.

“Some of my friends were playing rugby, mostly from the wrestling team, and they told me about it and I thought it sounded like fun,” Southworth recalled. “Every practice I started to like it even more. It took me a while to understand the rules—coming in I had zero knowledge of rugby. But it started to click halfway through my sophomore year.”