July 18, 2001
Baja tackles rugby head-on
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
With her sights sent on Barcelona, Spain, next May, Kristen Baja has her work cut out for her.
A member of the USA Rugby Women's National Team, Baja plans to play with the team in the World Cup. There's just a few small matters of a job, a place to live and enough time and money to hone her skills in the interim.
Baja is an elite athlete playing a sport virtually unknown in the United States and without sponsorship for women. However, Baja does not chafe at the personal sacrifices of a stable career (she works temp jobs to accommodate her travel schedule), frequent travel (to rugby matches around the world) and a huge financial drain (she personally finances all her travel, equipment and training- to the tune of $15,00 a year.) Not to mention occasionally living out of her car when between jobs and matches.
These are small prices to pay for playing the sport she loves.
"I was a soccer player and somebody asked to play rugby one day," said Baja, recalling a day in college at Arizona State University a few years ago. "I went to the team's first practice and just became addicted, I started playing rugby then and never looked back."
Catching on to the sport was at first a challenge because she had barely heard of it before. It took a year before she really got all the terms down and could understand the strategies of play.
"All of a sudden the light went on one day and it all made sense," said Baja, a Northville native whose parents moved to Traverse City eight years ago.
While an obscure sport here, rugby is wildly popular around the world, especially in the United Kingdom and former British colonies. The Rugby World Cup is played every four years and is bigger than the Super Bowl, Baja noted. The United States Women's National Team has gone four times and won in 1991.
"Everybody is interested in the sport that I meet on planes but most people in the United States have never heard of it," she said.
In fact, rugby originated in England during a soccer game in the mid-1800s when a player suddenly picked up a ball and started running. Considered the original football, rugby has 15-member teams and any player can pitch laterally, run with or kick the game's egg-shaped ball. The game is played on a field called a pitch and has two 40-minute halves where all players are in constant motion. There are no time outs or substitutions; if the ball goes out of play someone just tosses it back in
Watching the game is like witnessing a controlled brawl but, unlike in American football, no one is out to hurt his or her opponents. Players tend to play for the whole game unless they start bleeding from an injury, a rare occurrence considering the game's many tackles.
"I tend to be out there for the whole 80 minutes," said Baja, who graduated from Arizona State in May with a degree in Therapeutic Recreation. "You usually only substitute for an injury or poor performance. Nobody is out to hurt anybody purposely."
Baja is a versatile player, and like many can field five or six positions. She mainly concentrates on flyhalf, which is like a quarterback, and center.
Baja was selected to play on the Women's National Team this year and is the youngest member of the team. She is moving to New York City in August and plans to base herself there until the World Cup. She will play with a club there and also travel to four or five games with the Women's National Team.
The team gathers for practice a week before a match, getting themselves to wherever the game is played. Then it is an intense seven days of build-up before the match.
"You get nervous, especially the four days building up to the game," Baja said. "But when you get into the game it is great because you get into the flow of rugby and forget about everything else."