The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-10-24
ALAMEDA HAS
A RUGBY TEAM
Game Should Be Started Here
and Island Team Visit
Coast Next Year.

Those boys of the Alameda are moth
ing if not sportsmen. They have
fine cricket eleven and now it comes
out that they can play baseball and
Rugby equally well. Tomorrow morn
ing at Kapiolani park they will butt up
against the Engineers and the poor old
bilge divers win surely get theirs.
It is not known yet who will umpire
the game. Charlie Lambert has been
suggested but the Alameda boys have
heard of his blatant partiality through
the columns of this paper and will not
stand for him. Whoever umpires the
Sunday morning games at Kapiolani
must be natural humorist anyway as
the games are always by way of big
joke and a jolly good time.
There will be no cricket this after
noon as most of the players will be at
soccer practice on Punahou field. The
Alameda boys have quite fast Rugby
aggregation ana IL is great pity that
there is no team here to play them.
is no doubt that Rugby is one of the
cleanest and most fascinating games
ever invented. It should not be hard to
find fifteen athletes willing to get to-
gether and play a game with the sailors
when they are in port. It goes without
saying that it is useless to call on the
oldtimers. While the heart may beat
longingly in the massive bosom of the
al
decree that the game is too strenuous
and there is no time and incentive to
go to the hard work of getting into
condition.
This is a fine chance to start little
interest in the game. There should be
some interest aroused because Rugby
is played almost exclusively on the coast
and there should be, by all the laws
of sport, an entente cordiale established
between the universities of the coast
and the islands
Over there all varsity games draw
so well that trip of baseball or
Rugby team from the islands could
hardly fail to be financial success. It
is much too late to figure on getting
together a team to play on the coast
this season, but there is no reason why
So far as learning the game is con-
cerned that is a matter of coaching
more than anything else. Precedent
has proved in several instances that the
game can be quickly learned and well
played by bunch of genuine enthusi-
asts. Pomona College had just four
weeks in which to learn the game be-
fore they met Berkeley and Stanford
and they gave good account of them
selves in both games although their
fastest sprinters did not turn out. The
Castaways had just one weak in which
to train before coming within an ace
of beating Stanford and eight of their
men had actually never played before.
The writer has had experience in put
ting teams hip to the game in the last
three years and would be only too glad
to do everything he could if there be
any sign of a possibility of getting a
team together
The material that is wanted is young
enthusiasts who go in to the game with
vigor and really want to get fit and
learn how to play. ANY other kind is use
less. The oldtime crack who is past the |
days when he has right to play or the |
tentative dilletante who makes half a |
Joke of the game are alike useless on /
the field. Given twenty young athletes
of the wonderful caliber of nearly all |
our islanders, with a genuine wish to !
learn the game and go to the coast to !
wipe the earth with the crack teams
there, given also two months in which
to get fit and practice and the thing is
done.