Fifty Years of TWATS: The Surprisingly Long History of the Rockford Ravens Rugby Club

 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.

Rockford’s Symbol: Enduring Art or a Giant Red Boondoggle?

Rockford’s Symbol: Enduring Art or a Giant Red Boondoggle?

There are certain things a Rockford artist eventually learns are expected of them. Sooner or later, somebody is going to suggest a sock monkey. A screw is always available. The Rockford Peaches remain eternally on deck. And looming over all of it, quite literally, is The Symbol.

You know The Symbol. Everybody in Rockford knows The Symbol, even if quite a few people couldn't tell you what it is supposed to symbolize.

Officially titled Symbol, the enormous sculpture standing near the Rock River was created by Russian-born American sculptor Alexander Liberman, one of the major figures in 20th-century American monumental sculpture. Constructed from massive steel cylinders painted bright red, the work has become one of Rockford's most recognizable landmarks.

But Rockford's relationship with it has never been quite that simple.

When Symbol arrived in the 1970s, it immediately became something Rockford excels at producing: an argument.

To supporters, it was exactly the sort of ambitious public artwork a city like Rockford should have. Here was a monumental sculpture by an internationally recognized artist, placed prominently along the river and impossible to mistake for anything else. Rockford wasn't merely decorating a park. It was participating in contemporary art on a scale usually associated with much larger cities.

To critics, it was a collection of giant red pipes.

And expensive ones.

That disagreement has followed Symbol for decades. Depending on whom you ask, it is an important example of modern public sculpture, an enduring Rockford landmark, an incomprehensible pile of industrial tubing, or evidence that somebody somewhere had access to public money and very persuasive presentation materials.

Which may be precisely why it has succeeded.

Public art that everyone immediately agrees is pleasant tends to become invisible. A tasteful statue sits in a park. People walk past it. Nobody argues about it at the dinner table thirty years later.

Rockford has been arguing about Symbol for roughly half a century.

Liberman's work makes particular sense in an industrial city. His monumental sculptures frequently used cylinders, beams and other fabricated steel forms, transforming the vocabulary of factories and heavy industry into abstraction. In Rockford—a city whose identity was built around manufacturing, machinery and metalworking—the material doesn't exactly feel foreign.

It looks manufactured because it is.

It looks industrial because it is.

And it looks a little like somebody dropped the contents of a gigantic machine shop beside the Rock River because, well, this is Rockford.

Over time, however, something happened that neither the sculpture's defenders nor its detractors could completely control. Symbol stopped merely being a controversial piece of public art and became The Symbol.

The capitalization almost feels necessary.

It became part of the city's visual shorthand. Photograph Rockford long enough and eventually The Symbol appears. Design something intended to announce ROCKFORD and somebody will suggest putting The Symbol in it. Along with the sock monkey, the screw and the Rockford Peaches, it entered that small collection of images Rockford continually uses to explain itself to itself.

That doesn't mean everybody suddenly decided they liked it.

That's the interesting part.

A landmark doesn't necessarily require affection. It requires recognition. The Eiffel Tower was despised by prominent artists when it was built. Plenty of cities contain monuments their residents spent years mocking before eventually becoming fiercely protective of them. Familiarity does strange things to public art. Yesterday's monstrosity becomes today's landmark and tomorrow's irreplaceable piece of civic identity.

Imagine someone announcing tomorrow that The Symbol was going to be removed permanently.

People who have spent forty years calling it ugly would probably be among the first to complain.

Because after all this time, the question isn't really whether Symbol is beautiful.

The better question is whether Rockford would feel slightly less like Rockford without it.

Rockford Symbol

I think it would.

And maybe that's the final verdict on the old argument about whether The Symbol was a boondoggle or enduring art.

A boondoggle disappears when the money is gone.

Art hangs around long enough for everybody to argue about what it means.

Nearly fifty years later, those giant red pipes are still standing beside the Rock River, and Rockford is still arguing.

That sounds suspiciously like art.