We've been following the Syracuse Men's Rugby Team (The Hammerheads) and their very successful season, winning the New York State Premier Division and putting on a great showing in the Northeast Playoffs. The team's not done yet as they keep on advancing through the National Collegiate Rugby Championship. The Orange are the No. 9 seed in the Round of Sixteen for April's tournament.
Herein lies the rub. Those championships are being played in Santa Barbara, CA. Being that rugby is a club sport at SU, they're not exactly rolling in Jim Boeheim money. One of the team's members, Franco DeLisa, reached out to me with some information and how SU fans & alums might be able to help them accomplish their goal. I hand it over to him...
For the second year in a row we finished first in the NYS Premier Division, which is part of Division 1 Rugby, the highest level of competition available for U.S. colleges. This year we took advantage of our high playoff seed and dispatched Harvard and Dartmouth in route to claiming the #9 seed in the National Round of 16, to be played the weekend of April 16th. The site of our tournament games is Santa Barbara CA, which brings me to my point. As we are a club sport at Syracuse, we are allotted a small budget (of roughly $2,000 I believe) of which we have already exhausted over the course of our fall season. In order to get a 22-25 man roster to California, SURFC needs to raise somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 20,000 dollars.
There is a Facebook group dedicated to this, which directs people to donate at our Alumni Associations website. It may also be worth checking out our club website which provides more detailed information about our club and our history (I'm the big dude in the middle with the mohawk in the picture on our homepage).
Basically, any support you can give would give a tremendous boost to what we are hoping to accomplish as a club.
So there you have it. Whether you want to help out cause you want to see your SU team compete and do well or just because the big dude with the mohawk is asking and you don't want any trouble...there's no bad reason to help the guys out. Plus, the easier it is for them to come out to Santa Barbara, the easier it is for me to meet them for the post-game celebration at Dargan's.
Check out those donation links above and help if you can.