He heard the rugby club’s great reviews, thought it looked “really cool,” and ended up on the active roster for the fall 2021 season, before sitting out this year to focus on Dagger and Book, an organization promoting student mental health through friendship and adventure that he co-founded with another veteran at the College. A native of Hilo, Hawaii, and recipient of the Bronze Star with valor for his service, Ige started Harvard as a first-year at age 29, following his last deployment in 2020 and a brief COVID pause. In a given year, there are anywhere from four to eight vets competing on the active roster. Like Allen and Rosales, Ige had no previous experience with the game. “Well, the guys play rugby,” vets at HUVO told him. Having experienced the camaraderie of the military, being older and with more life experience than many of his classmates, rugby has helped him find a place on campus.ĭuring the acceptance process, he connected with the Harvard Undergraduate Veterans Organization (HUVO) through the nonprofit Service to School, and asked what vets do socially on campus. Rosales is a 33-year-old native of El Centro, California, whose wife, Christina, and 9-year-old daughter, Audreyana, remain on the West Coast while he currently resides in Canaday Hall. You immediately feel like people have your back.” “It’s very difficult to find a similar camaraderie in organizations out in the civilian world, to build those types of bonds that give you that sense of love, that family, that structure. “There are a lot of similarities to the Marine Corps, where you rely on somebody to the left or the right of you,” Rosales said. … And I also just love the guys.”Īmong them are first-year Aaron Rosales, who served eight years in the Marine Corps, and sophomore Nick Ige, who did six combat tours in Afghanistan with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment. “You won’t be a cohesive unit unless you can come together on the pitch and off, and the parallels between the military and rugby in that sense really stood out to me. When it’s go time, you all come together,” said the Currier House resident, a native of suburban Chicago. “It doesn’t matter that you come from this background, or if you’re in that social group or this club. When the fall of 2021 brought a return to relative normalcy, he found a home there.Īllen, who worked as a nuclear mechanic in the Navy, is among the small but growing number of military veterans in the College’s undergraduate community - this year’s count is 59 - and one of several who have found connectivity on the rugby pitch. “We’d do tackling drills behind Greenough and run around, just to stay in shape.” Some classmates saw their workouts and told Allen about the men’s rugby club. Fellow Greenough Hall resident and Israeli veteran Elianne Sacher, who had played rugby for Israel’s national team and was on Harvard’s women’s team, introduced him to the game. Ben Allen was looking for ways to stay physically active under strict COVID restrictions when he first came to Harvard in fall 2020 after retiring early from the Navy due to a medical condition.
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