The Furman men\u2019s rugby team will launch the 2012-13 season with the squad\u2019s first practice Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. at Roberts Rugby Field.<\/p>\n
The team, which returns about a dozen players from last spring, will rely heavily on new recruits to fill out the squad.\u00a0 All prospective players should wear shorts, a t-shirt and cleats (if you have them, if not, running shoes will be fine.)<\/p>\n
The team will be working to rebound from a disappointing, injury-plagued 2011-12 campaign, which saw the team finish with a 7-9 record, the Paladins first losing season in 12 years.<\/p>\n
John Roberts enters his 15th<\/sup> year as head coach the Paladins.\u00a0 He is assisted by two-year coach Darren Scott, a former New Zealand professional rugby player. Roberts has a 156-58-1 career coaching record.\u00a0 His teams have collected three national championships, two national runner titles and seven South championships.<\/p>\n Next year, the team will welcome its first recruiting class of five scholarship rugby players.\u00a0 This scholarship program, launched with financial assistance from rugby alumni and friends, will offer substantial financial assistance to rugby players.<\/p>\n Nick Rossano, a freshman from Greer, joins the team this year as the program\u2019s first scholarship recipient. Captain for his high school team, Rossano is a two-year state and regional all-star.<\/p>\n \u201cOur scholarship program will allow us to attract national-caliber rugby players,\u201d says Roberts.\u00a0 \u201cThey will help launch our play to an entire different level.\u00a0 Still we are continuing to recruit from our student body.\u00a0 We hope the scholarship program will ignite more even more interest in our program.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Furman men\u2019s rugby team will launch the 2012-13 season with the squad\u2019s first practice Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. at Roberts Rugby Field. The team, which returns about a dozen players from last spring, will rely heavily on new recruits to fill out the squad.\u00a0 All prospective players should wear shorts, a t-shirt and cleats (if you have them, if not, running shoes will be fine.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics","category-rugby"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}