Despite their success, the ASU women's rugby team faces challenges as they try to grow. Juliana Vazquez talks about her role as president and the things she wants to see in terms of growth for the club.
Song: Water Please
Transcription:
Juliana Vazquez [00:04]: Hi, I'm Juliana Vazquez and I'm the president of ASU women's rugby club.
So, ASU women's rugby is the collegiate rugby team at Arizona State and we're currently D1 student athletes. Although we're a club sport with ASU we are recognized as a D1 team in the nation and we're actually top 15 in the nation within the past two years.
As president, I work the rest of my e-board which includes a vice president, a treasurer and a secretary to help plan events such as our recruiting events. We table about two to three times a month. We have fundraising events going on to help fund our games, our away tournaments, travel, food, stuff like that. And then we also have community volunteering events that we are required to do through the SDFC in order to get sports club funding and we do planned tournaments that happen during our preseason and then we plan our games that happen during our regular season.
As far as growth, I would like us to be where men's rugby is. Men's rugby is currently within a Pac-12 [conference] due to different funding opportunities they've been able to get, I'd like to see us there. I'd like to see our girls not have to worry about paying for equipment, or travel or anything like that. It'd be nice to have our girls travel in buses instead of driving their cars and being able to get more hotel rooms for everyone to have a bed to sleep on. Less of us not worrying about all these funding things that we have to do and more worrying more about rugby as a sport.
If people have an opportunity to learn about a new sport they definitely should take it because no one knows about rugby before coming in and by the time they are done with it, they want more. There are people who start off in college and end up in the Olympics just because they decided to take their time and energy with rugby and it becomes more than just the sport, it becomes a family on and off the pitch.
Reach the reporter at cchild1@asu.edu or follow @_cchild88 on Twitter.
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