The 2020-2021 rugby season for Neuqua HS in Naperville, Ill. starts next week.

OK, not literally. The players aren’t in school, there remain questions about COVID shutdowns and how students will return to school, but the first step of the season is always a meeting among the entire coaching staff to talk about last year, look at what could be improved, and to make plans for winter training and the 2021 spring season.

“We are always looking for that incremental improvement,” said Head Coach John Chevalier. “It’s not about perfect, it’s about being half a step better in a lot of areas.”

Neuqua is taking those half steps every year, and those half-steps are making the Wildcats one of the toughest single-school teams in the Midwest, if not the country.

A Team Of Their Own

Based out of Naperville, a city of 150,000 about 30 miles west of Chicago, Neuqua was born out of the robust Naperville Crusaders youth program. When a large number of kids graduated from 8th grade and aged out of the Crusaders program, they didn’t want to play for a team that represented other schools, and instead lobbied to form a single-school program at Neuqua.

They got their wish. Chevalier came in to help lead them and a team of mostly freshmen performed well in the third division of the Rugby Illinois competition. Each year they progressed up the ranks, and the kids in that program brought in their friends.

“What was helpful for us was that the core group of kids who started the team were also really good football players, and formed the core of the Neuqua football team.”

What that meant was from the beginning, Neuqua Rugby, just a club sport in the public high school, has enjoyed a good relationship with the football program.

Football And Rugby Together

“The kids came in as freshmen and said ‘we play football in the fall and rugby in the spring, that’s what we do,’” related Chevalier. So from the beginning it was just accepted that that was the state of affairs.

With Neuqua football not opposing a student’s choice to play rugby in the spring, the Neuqua Rugby roster ballooned to 60, with, said Chevalier, about two-thirds being football players. The football program will wanted the players to do lifting in the spring, and that was just fine with the rugby program, and so in a nice piece of inter-sport cooperation, the football coaching staff invited the non-football rugby players to the lifting sessions as well.

One example of how the programs work together is a player who couldn’t crack the varsity football lineup as a junior. He played rugby, however, playing hooker for the Neuqua JV team and getting some time on the varsity team. Bu fall he was an all-conference linebacker putting in picture-perfect tackle after picture-perfect tackle. In the spring, he was a central figure in Neuqua’s state championship run.

That kind of story keeps Neuqua rugby in a good place on campus, and the school helps the program find indoor training space and meeting space as they become more and more a part of the on-campus tradition.

Wins and Losses Are Just Outcomes

Neuqua is a big school, and the rugby program recruits solid athletes. This year they were poised to do something special. Having breached the GRR Single-School top 20 for several weeks this past season, they were looking to rise even higher.

But the COVID-19 shutdown put an end to all of that, and ended the season for a group of 18 seniors who are all going on to play rugby or football in college.

“We were bitterly disappointed because we were playing well,” said Chevalier, who has two sons (Nick and Will) playing rugby in college and one more (Matt) coming through the Neuqua system. “But we’re looking ahead. We have a goal of having 20 players from each class. We’re not quite there yet but we have a huge freshman class. We have a great group of eight coaches, half of whom don’t have kids in the program. And we’re testing ourselves all the time.”

Neuqua did get a few games in this past spring chiefly because they took a trip to North Carolina for the Carolina Ruggerfest, where the JVs went 3-0 and the Varsity was were edged by the Wisconsin Badgers 15-14, beat Hudson, and lost to an excellent Charlotte Tigers team. It was a good lesson, said Chevalier.

“It was painful to take a beating from Charlotte, it was good because we saw what our weaknesses are,” he said. “We schedule tough games every year. We’ve got Royal Irish on the schedule for next year, and that’s the sort of game we need.”

Chevalier said winning isn’t the goal. The JV team has been very successful despite being told not to care about wins and losses. The key is that they continue to challenge themselves.

“We tell the players, wins and losses are just the outcomes,” Chevalier said. “If you fulfill your potential when you step out onto the pitch, the wins will come.”

The Recruiting Game

Recruiting is a big part of Neuqua’s success and like with most successful programs, the players do the recruiting by telling their friends that they are enjoying the experience. It of course doesn’t hurt that there’s a robust middle school program in Naperville.

They also put in a little recruiting plan after football season ends. During that down time between football and rugby the program hosts a once-a-week touch rugby session. There’s only minimal coaching, the idea is just to have fun and get the feel of the ball through the hands. But it is also a no-pressure introduction to the game for new players. Returning players bring their friends, they play a little touch rugby, have fun, and, said Chevalier, “pretty soon the new guys are hooked.”

Recruiting is also key when it comes to the parents. It’s the parents who pick up a lot of the additional workload, feeding the players, handling various other setup or organization duties.

When Chevalier decided he needed to film every game, he wasn’t sure how to get started, but asked the parents for some help. Within a day they had a new camera and an IPad to use for that purpose.

“Our parent involvement is huge for us,” he said.

On To College

Neuqua players are going on to success in college, too. Will Chevalier (Indiana) was the Big 10s Top Freshman last fall. Nick Chevalier was part of the Western Michigan team that made the national fall DIAA final. WMU is full of Neuqua players, with their captain, Joey Backe, one of them.

Louis Chrisos is patrolling fullback for a resurgent University of Illinois program, while , Griff Huffmon is the team captain at Iowa State.

And there’ll be more. Seven seniors (Nolan Baker, Kyle Kasche, Sean Larkin, Keegan Murray, Carl Reina, Puneet Singh, and Nathan Williamson) will go on to play football in college, and in fact the team manager, Joey Moore, will become the football team manager at Alabama, which is impressive in its own right. Meanwhile, 11 graduating seniors will be playing rugby in college: Charlie Ashley (Flyhalf, Iowa), Will Chrisos (Hooker, Western Michigan), Jeremy Cohen (Lock, Iowa State), Steven Coscino (Flanker, Michigan State), Eitan Marshall-Pinko (Scrumhalf, Boston University), Lou Miller (Prop, Western Michigan), Younis Nooraldeen (Flanker, Illinois), Nick Pastora (Flyhalf, Western Michigan), Cam Stack (Wing, Indiana), and Bobby Valiga (Flanker, Iowa State).

It’s a varied list of colleges welcoming Neuqua Wildcats, and expect that to happen more and more as this program grows.