Men's Rugby: Ignored and left to bleed

Hours later, he finally got it.

With no professional trainer on site, Pena was examined by the Wilderness First Responder (WFR) on duty, who sent him to McCosh Health Center, where he was promptly asked why he had not come sooner. Unable to administer a much-needed CAT scan, McCosh officials referred him to the University Medical Center at Princeton (UMCP), where he was finally treated.

Pena is just one of the many students and parents who have expressed concerns about the University’s failure to provide adequate medical support staff for members of the men’s club rugby team, who frequently incur serious injuries while playing the high-collision sport.

The tense negotiations between team members, their parents and administrators have centered around questions of how much the University is willing to spend on club sports and their commitment to the safety of student athletes.

Pena’s father, Ernesto, joined the ranks of those trying to effect a change in policy last fall. Travis said that when his father was on campus last semester, he spoke with a number of administrators about the issue, including Vice President for Campus Life Janet Dickerson. After seeing no such change, he tried again.

“Safety should always come first, and I don’t understand the University’s failure to see that protecting student athletes should be the same for those who play varsity or club contact sports,” Ernesto Pena said in a Feb. 17 e-mail to Dickerson obtained by The Daily Princetonian.

Dickerson responded three days later.

“The University is not prepared to add [two full-time Certified Athletics Trainers] from general funds when we are facing hiring freezes and other constraints due to the economic downturn,” she said in an e-mail on Feb. 20. “Until such funding is identified, we are not able to commit to the provision of services to students on club sports teams that are equivalent to those on varsity teams.”

Director of Athletics Gary Walters ’67, who declined to comment for this article, responded to the e-mail chain that same day, also saying that the University would not provide the necessary funds.

“If safety and cost are indeed the issues, and in effect if club sports are going to be treated like varsities, we should either have the team self fund (as we do with men varsities such as water polo, wrestling and volleyball) … or drop the club,” Walters said. “Put the safety issue back on them. [They] can’t have it both ways.”

Travis Pena said that the men’s and women’s rugby teams’ captains met with Assistant Director of Campus Recreation for Sport Clubs Mitch Reum on Feb. 24 to discuss a change in policy. At the meeting, Reum distributed a handout outlining the changes.

“For all home games — in [addition] to a First Responder, we will require [an] EMT/ambulance to be present at each match,” the document explained.

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The revised guidelines also made provisions for away matches. “In advance of upcoming away contests, the Assistant Director of Campus Recreation for Sport Clubs will be in contact with host institutions to determine if medical coverage is provided. In the event suitable coverage is not present at away games, Campus Recreation will attempt to procure a First Responder to travel with the team. As a last resort, covering away games with a local EMT is a possibility. If coverage cannot be provided, the contest may be cancelled because of the risk associated in playing without adequate care.”

“Additionally,” the document continued, “at least two members of the team shall have current CPR certification, be versed in the West Windsor Fields Emergency Action Plan … and be carrying a cell phone.”

Dickerson called the new policy a “cost-effective solution,” noting that the alumni friends group for rugby has agreed to provide funding for medical coverage at home games.

Travis Pena, however, said he was not satisfied with the solution because he believed it would place too great a financial burden on the team.

“The response from the University has been not to help us with what we requested, but to mandate that at home games we provide for ourselves — out of our own pockets — not only a WFR, which was inadequate and unhelpful, but also an ambulance,” he said.

Travis noted that a WFR costs $11.50 per hour, an EMT-and-ambulance package costs $75 per hour, and a trainer costs $30 per hour.

The rugby team’s vice president, sophomore Will Harsh, said that next year, club sports teams will see a 5 percent budget cut.

Travis Pena added that he was disappointed the revisions do not include providing the team with access to certified trainers.

“We requested a trainer, or access to the varsity trainers; someone who can tape ankles, assess ankle/knee/shoulder injuries so common in rugby, someone who could tape up a cut so that we could play the rest of the game and get stitches later on,” he said in an e-mail to the ‘Prince.’

He added that the new regulations will actually be an obstacle to the team in trying to hire a trainer. “Now, we have to provide ourselves with a kind of medical coverage that we don’t want, and the medical coverage we do want is not considered an adequate substitute (i.e. we can’t have a certified athletic trainer instead of an ambulance), and having all three would be fiscally impossible for us,” he explained.

Senior captain Benton Erwin also stressed the importance of hiring a trainer for the team, noting the disparity between the services offered to club and varsity teams.

“As a club sport, we are not covered by the athletic trainers or the varsity medical support, nor are we even allowed to consult them,” Erwin said. “Finding a freelance trainer is pretty hard. There have not been trainers, and we have had to cancel games.”

The University’s policy revision came in the wake of a slew of serious injuries to rugby players, especially at away games, team members said.

“I was playing in a match in Millersville, Pa., and I dislocated my shoulder due to a rough tackle,” said Josh Knight, a senior on the team. “There was no professional medical staff on site at all, so I was actually just left by myself lying on my back on the field for about 20 minutes [until] one of the parents of the home team players [who] knew where the hospital was gave our coach directions to the hospital.”

Obtaining timely transportation to the hospital has been a recurring problem for the team, Travis Pena said.

“When someone gets hurt, we have to ask who has a car [and] who wants to drive me to [UMCP],” he explained, adding that “we’ve been having to use WFRs from [Outdoor Action as support]. Unfortunately, they are not really [properly] trained.”

Men’s rugby team head coach Richard Lopacki, who came to Princeton in 2000, said he has been working to increase the medical support for at least the last three years.

“We have worked across the other club sports teams as well as with parents to raise the sense of urgency to find an institutionalized solution which benefits all club sports’ athletes,” Lopacki explained in an e-mail to the ‘Prince.’

Other team members noted that the University lags behind peer institutions in providing support for club sports.

“Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth and Stanford have dedicated club sports or rugby trainers,” Harsh said.

He added that he did not think financial concerns were as important a factor in the University’s decisions as administrators made it seem.

“Of course we are being told they don’t have any money,” he said. “This is not a rugby issue or a funds issue … [The University] spends millions on campus gardening … It is really a student health and safety issue. Their priorities are way out of whack.”