With an origin traceable to the mid-1960s, the NC State men’s club rugby program has been a fixture for Wolfpack students for over 50 years. Not only is it graced in history, however, but the men’s club rugby team is also one of storied success, especially in recent years.

Tom Kiernan, a third-year studying business administration, is the 2017 treasurer and team captain. He began playing rugby around when he was 10 years old and hasn’t stopped since.

Kiernan was born and raised in Ireland and moved to the United States during the second semester of his junior year of high school. As soon as he started taking classes at NC State in 2015, he became involved with the men’s club rugby team. In Ireland, rugby is immensely popular and can be compared in popularity to the NFL in the U.S.

“I moved here from Ireland like three, four years ago,” Kiernan said. “It’s a bigger sport back there. Then I just started to play when I came here and just like instinctively started doing it when I came to State.”

For NC State, club rugby is divided into two seasons, fall and spring. In the fall, the team plays a style of rugby with 15 players from each team on a field of 112-122 x 68 meters. This type is simply and commonly referred to as “fifteens.” In the spring, the field size stays the same, but each team consists of only seven players in what is known as “sevens.”

“It’s more technical [for fifteens],” Kiernan said. “There’s more things you have to think and there’s more structure that goes into it.”

Since men’s club rugby is not an official Division I collegiate sport, schools must play club in order to compete with each other. Schools form conferences based on location and competition levels.

“We’re generally a D-I school. During my freshman year we were in a conference with Clemson, Maryland and Virginia Tech and a few other D-I colleges,” Kiernan said. “Then that disbanded because Clemson wanted to move into a more southern conference and Maryland wanted to move into a more northern conference. So there was no D-I conference for us to go into, so we got, kinda by default, put into this D-II Virginia conference.”

Since fall of 2016, NC State has been a part of the Cardinals Collegiate Rugby Conference or CCRC for short. The CCRC consists of 20 teams, most of which are smaller Division II schools based in Virginia such as the Virginia Military Institute and Christopher Newport University. Duke University is also in the CCRC.

In 2016, its inaugural season in the conference, NC State put together a perfect 9-0 record and won the conference title with a 19-14 victory over Northern Virginia. The team then went on to reach the Elite Eight of the Division II College National Championship before losing to eventual National Runner-Up Furman University.

This year, in its second “fifteens” season in the CCRC, NC State wreaked havoc on its opponents once again, this time finishing 7-1 overall and as runners-up in the conference to VMI.

“We beat one team by like 90-something points,” Kiernan said. “Our only stiff competition has been VMI.”

NC State defeated VMI 34-29 on Sept. 16, but fell 40-22 on Nov. 5.

“We had a few injuries,” Kiernan said. “I couldn’t play [on Nov. 5]; I tore my bicep. We had two guys, one got a fractured ankle, dislocated ankle. Then we had three, four injuries in the game that, we lost the game just from not having our starting team out there.”

As second-place finishers in the CCRC, NC State has been granted a play-in home game against East Carolina University on Saturday for the regional tournament. The winner of the game gets a spot in the Sweet 16 with a matchup against Norwich, which will be played in Kutztown, Pennsylvania.

“I’m missing the ECU game this weekend,” Kiernan said. “And then I’m hopefully going to be back for the round of 16 of the quarterfinals for regionals. I’m getting my MRI done tomorrow and we’re gonna see how bad it is.”

The team will need to defeat ECU, Norwich and one other team to find a spot in the semifinals. The semifinals and the final, which are known as “nationals” are held this year at Furman University in South Carolina.

While the long-term goal of the NC State men’s club rugby program is to return to a Division I conference like the one it played in two years ago, the immediate goal is to capture the Division II National Championship in the coming weeks.

“We’re just strictly doing knockout stages with nationals,” Kiernan said. “So if you lose, you’re gone.”

The play-in game against ECU will take place at the Raleigh Rugby Football Club Saturday.