November 26 2016 Atlantis at New York Sevens

The oldest sevens tournament in the country, the New York Sevens goes back to 1959. Amazingly the college champion that year was a school whose fight song includes the following (you need to say it letter by letter, with feeling)!
 
M-A-S-S-A-C-H-U-S-E-T-T-S-I-N-S-T-I-T-U-T-E-O-F-T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y

  ... with the ending of the chant going like this, after the "G", you say  " ... and Y comes after G / the Massachusetts Institute / of Technolo-GEE!," proudly.  Somewhere in there is also "Rah for Technology, 'ology, 'ology, oh" and, yes, there's more.

Perhaps even more amazingly (considering what year it is now), I was an undergraduate at MIT at the time (but not yet a member of the rugby community).  Another coincidence is that when I was in high school, my school - Manhattan's Xavier High School - played its home football games at Randall's Island, the current site of the NY Sevens, so I have always been familiar with the venue.

Several years later, in 1970, I had my first New York Sevens moment.  At my parents' (Paterson, NJ) for the Thanksgiving weekend, I showed up well before 8 AM just to hang out and try to figure out this 7-a-side game, but was asked if I'd be interested in reffing a couple of games until the tardy scheduled refs showed up.  Just a random player, and not a ref, I nevertheless said "sure" (I figured it'd keep me warm). I got sent to one of the fields on the periphery of Randall's Island. Several hours and either 13 or 14 games later, all of which I reffed (I was fit then, and whoever was organizing the refs kept bringing me scraps of paper to fill out- but no relief), I was asked if I'd ref the collegiate final. It was a reward for being such a hard worker, they said. Like I said, I was fit (and I believed them), so I said sure.

In the dark, with car lights trained on the field (there were no lit fields at the time), all I recall is giving the game-winning try without actually seeing it. (The player with the ball disappeared from view, and his teammates cheered. Whistle. Try. Game over.) I no longer remember the teams - Holy Cross? Syracuse? BC? Someday I'll have to see if the NY 7s recorded its 1970 collegiate champion.

Randall's Island has a lot more fields now, most of them modern synthetic turf (in the old days they were not only shoddy looking grass with lots of dirt, parts of the surface that were of ankle-breaking quality, and even the occasional areas of broken glass scattered about). One of the fields in those days - I think it was Manhattan's - had goal posts made of telephone poles.  Nevertheless, with all the improvements, even today they still rush to finish their 2,000,000 (or whatever) games before dark. Of course they have a zillion (roughly) more teams than they used to.

Reflections on Randall's Island

The professional student and frustrated would-be teacher in me is always wondering about something.  In this case, I was always confused by the way the same island - nestled in the East River between the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens - was sometimes referred to as Randall's Island, and sometimes as Wards Island. Looking at maps, even there the island is referred to sometimes simply as Wards Island and sometimes as Randalls Island. I watched the movie The French Connection when it first came out (1971), and I was very surprised to see a scene near the end which I recognized as Randall's Island. "Hey! I shouted to whoever was in hearing distance," "that's Randall's Island; my high school used to play football there!"  But when I looked it up just now, this "drug deal and shoot-out scene" I was watching is listed as taking place on Wards Island. So, after a lifetime of being there dozens of times, and wondering - for a few fractions of a second at a time - what the hell this island really was, I decided to do a little research.

On going to google.com and searching for Randall's Island, I found it - but on the map it was tagged "Ward's Island."  On zooming in on the map the south of the unnamed island is marked "Wards Island Park" (no apostrophe) and in the north is "Randall's Island Park." But it's all one island. So I went to Wikipedia, nearly always reliable, where I read:

"Randalls Island (also called Randall's Island) and Wards Island are conjoined islands, collectively called Randalls and Wards Islands, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, separated from Manhattan by the Harlem River, from Queens by the East River and Hell Gate, and from the Bronx by the Bronx Kill."

That was only partly satisfying: Randall's and Wards Islands? Plural? I only ever thought it was one island. According to the several articles on the web, they definitely started out as two.  It appears that the city, to gain more park land, began filling in the channel between the islands in the late 1930s, with the chore not finished until the early 1960s.  So now that it's one island, it still goes under the two islands names? I.e. "Randalls and Wards Islands" are in reality one island?  Without an apostrophe? The English language wonk in me is disturbed.

Atlantis and Age Grade Sevens

Besides a 1999 unofficial collegiate side that we entered into the senior bracket of the Magnificent Sevens in Toronto, the first Atlantis age-grade teams were those we entered in the Las Vegas Sevens in 2014.

By the end of 2016 we have now fielded, besides this year's Collegiate Men, boys and girls High School, Under 18 and Under 16 teams (I think one year one of the divisions was U19). This has been a great decision - first suggested by Atlantis General Manager Biddy Boyle - and will, besides adding to the Atlantis family, add to the number of USA Rugby youth players with experience at a high level.  Hopefully in the future there will be even more Eagles that can trace their development in part back to Atlantis.

On December 23, 2016 (as I was writing this article), USA Rugby published a list of 41 players selected to the AIG Junior All Americans for 2017; 11 of them - 27% - are Atlantis alumnae.

They are, with their Atlantis numbers,

1120 Cassidy Bargell
1158 Lily Durbin
1111 Giovanna Ferguson-Lewis
1159 Natalie Gray
1122 Delia Hellander
1113 Emily Henrich
1100 Grace Kiraly
1212 Taylor Makowski
1090 Dineken Paogofie-Buyten
 970  Kat Ramage
1231 Julia Riekena

Atlantis at the 2016 New York Sevens

2016 was better-than-average NY 7s weather, though cold it was dry, and breezy rather than blustery.  I was glad to have an interest in 3 teams (though I was coaching none - sometimes I wonder if being the Emperor of Atlantis is better than being the coach, and I don't think I've come to a conclusion).

I had virtually nothing to do with the collegiate men's side other than use Joe Kelly's selection and coaching skills to add to Atlantis' record, and just a bit more than nothing with the girls', although I did attend our only practice session the evening before the tournament, and tried to say a "wise thing" here and there. And as always, I made sure we got a team photograph.

At any rate, it was a great weekend, and I hope to see several of these players not only represent Atlantis in the future but also the US; as of December 2016, 218 Atlantis players (both sexes) have also represented the US; 98 of those represented Atlantis first.

The collegiate men's team story is documented here:

A summary of the two high school girls' teams' experience is documented here: