Ruben, Roman, and Hugh have earned their Level 1 certification from USA Rugby. Three upperclassmen who decided that playing the game was not going to be the whole of their involvement in it.
They will be working with and under Coach Martin, Ken, and Jason, the staff already running Gators Rugby, and that is the point. Level 1 is the entry qualification in USA Rugby's coaching pathway. It is the badge you earn before you have anything to prove, so that when a session needs a second pair of hands, or a new player needs someone watching their body position rep after rep, there is someone qualified standing there.
What Level 1 actually covers. It is not a formality. The curriculum is built around the safe teaching of contact, meaning tackle technique, the ruck, and scrum setup and the roles inside it, along with session planning, stage-appropriate progression, and the management of risk during training. In a sport where the difference between a good tackle and a dangerous one is technique taught early and corrected often, that curriculum is the whole job.
For three players still in the squad, earning it now means learning the coaching side from inside a staff that has been doing it, while they still have boots on. Roman and Hugh will run a session and then change and take the field with the players they just ran it for. Ruben is on the coaching side of it. All three are doing something upperclassmen at a club this size are uniquely placed to do: pass on what they were taught, by the people who taught it to them, before they graduate and carry it somewhere else.
That last part is not incidental. Gators Rugby is student-led. The officers recruit, book the travel, and run the day-to-day. But it does not stand on that alone. It stands on one of the strongest alumni associations in college rugby. The University of Florida Rugby Alumni Association is why there is a coaching staff to learn under, why there is a season to coach into, and why players who graduate tend to stay reachable. Every Gator who has come through this program and stayed connected is part of the reason three undergraduates can get certified and have somewhere to put it.
Which is how the pipeline is supposed to work. A player learns the game here, learns to teach it here, graduates, and stays in it. Some of them come back. Some of them coach where they land. That is the alumni network doing what an alumni network is for, one certification at a time.
Heading into the season, that is three more qualified people on the training pitch and three more Gators with a reason to stay in rugby after the last game they play. Congratulations to Ruben, Roman, and Hugh, and to the staff they are learning from.
Go Gators. 🐊
