Rockford has never had much trouble finding sports to call its own.
We had the Rockford Peaches. We have the IceHogs. We have the Ski Broncs building improbable human pyramids on the Rock River. We have golf courses, baseball diamonds, basketball courts, bowling alleys, and enough sports complexes that at some point somebody apparently decided our most renewable natural resource was athletic fields.
And for the last fifty years, we've also had rugby.
The Rockford Ravens Rugby Football Club was established in 1976, which means the Ravens are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2026. That's half a century of Rockford men and women voluntarily running toward other large human beings without the benefit of shoulder pads, helmets, or the good sense to throw the ball forward.
That deserves some recognition.
How the Ravens Got Here
The early history has acquired a little bit of legend.
According to a 2016 history of the club, the Ravens were reportedly started by an Englishman who moved to the area in 1976. The club was originally associated with Oregon, Illinois, then Kishwaukee, before eventually settling permanently in Rockford.
Whatever the exact circumstances of its birth, the Rockford Ravens survived.
That's significant.
Sports teams come and go. Recreational leagues form, flourish for a few years, lose players, lose fields, lose organizers, and disappear. Maintaining any volunteer athletic organization for fifty years requires something considerably stronger than enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon exercise.
The Ravens developed a culture.
Today the club operates under the Forest City Rugby Union, a nonprofit organization, and includes men's, women's, and youth rugby. The men's and women's first sides compete at the Division III level.
Their home field is at Lyran Park on South Bend Road, where the Ravens also hold their annual Luck of the Draw rugby tournament.
But understanding the Ravens requires understanding something about rugby itself.
A Hooligan's Game Played by Gentlemen
American football has whistles.
Rugby seems to regard whistles mostly as irritating interruptions to what everyone came there to do.
Players run, kick, tackle, scrum and pass the ball across the field, with one particularly confusing rule for Americans: the ball cannot simply be thrown forward toward the goal line. Rugby players advance while passing laterally or backward, although they can kick the ball forward.
There are no helmets and no shoulder pads.
This occasionally produces exactly the results you would imagine.
But one of the fascinating things about rugby is the contrast between the violence of the game and the culture surrounding it. A 2016 interview with a Ravens captain used the old description of rugby as "a hooligan's game played by gentlemen."
That seems particularly appropriate here.
After spending a match tackling one another into the ground, rugby teams traditionally socialize together. The home team feeds the visitors. Players share drinks, tell stories, sing songs and generally behave as though the people attempting to flatten them an hour earlier are now old friends.
For the Ravens, that social tradition isn't incidental.
The club describes camaraderie as one of its greatest strengths. Former players don't necessarily disappear when their playing days end. They become officers, organizers and social members. The club holds picnics, parties, breakfasts and banquets and participates in charitable and community activities.
In other words, joining the Ravens has traditionally meant joining something larger than a team.
The Girls Brought Home a State Championship
The Ravens' history isn't merely longevity.
Rockford has also produced championship rugby.
According to Rugby Illinois records, the Rockford Ravens girls won the Illinois high school rugby championship in 2010, defeating Plainfield for the title.
That wasn't an isolated appearance near the top of Illinois rugby. Rockford returned to the championship match several times, finishing second in 2012 and 2015 and sharing a runner-up listing in 2013.
Rugby Illinois credits Rockford with four girls' state title-match appearances.
For a sport that still exists somewhere outside the consciousness of many local sports fans, Rockford rugby has quietly accumulated a respectable history.
Then There Are the TWATS
Eventually, playing rugby in Illinois apparently wasn't enough.
The Ravens also developed a tradition of international touring.
Every few years members travel overseas as the Wild American Touring Side.
Yes.
The acronym is TWATS.
I have checked this.
In 2022, sixty-two people representing ten different rugby clubs traveled across Scotland with the Ravens touring side. They played three matches, defeating Isle of Islay 12-7 and Moray 30-25 before losing to Lochaber 24-12.
They returned to Rockford with a winning international record of 2-1 and, presumably, several stories unsuitable for inclusion in a respectable local history blog.
The Scottish clubs also participated fully in rugby's social traditions. On Islay, the home club fed the entire traveling party after the match, and the visitors toured local distilleries. In Elgin, Moray Rugby Club presented the Americans with homemade haggis.
There are worse ways for a Rockford sports team to spend an afternoon.
Fifty Years and Still Running
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Rockford Ravens isn't a championship, a Scottish tour or even surviving fifty years.
It's that the basic idea still works.
The club continues to invite people who have never played rugby before to come out and learn. Its current men's, women's and youth programs keep alive something that began locally in 1976, when rugby was considerably more exotic to the average American than it is today.
There is something very Rockford about that persistence.
This city has always accumulated strange and wonderful institutions around its edges. Some become famous. Others simply keep doing what they do decade after decade until suddenly you look up and realize they've become part of the history of the place.
The Rockford Ravens are one of those institutions.
For fifty years they've practiced, traveled, competed, won championships, thrown parties, recruited newcomers, welcomed old players back, toured foreign countries and tackled one another into the grass.
The Peaches got a movie.
The IceHogs get an arena.
The Ski Broncs get the Rock River.
But somewhere in Rockford, there has been a rugby match going on since 1976.
Happy 50th anniversary to the Rockford Ravens.
Not bad for a bunch of TWATS.
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