There were a lot of Eastern women’s rugby injuries at Indiana.

There were a lot of reshuffling of positions, and sophomore fullback Ashley Jenkins said she had to come up and play outside center for a few plays.

“I was constantly thinking, ‘What if they kick it? Am I going to have to run back and get the ball? Who is going to be with me? Am I going to make it back in time?'” Jenkins said.

This weekend Eastern had four players go down with various injuries.

And, you know what they did?

They played 11 on 15.

These women, watched teammate after teammate go down, but kept playing this brutal game.

In most other sports you at least have a few people to come off the bench and fill those spots.

This was not the case, at least not this year.

Head coach Frank Graziano said it would be nice to have the extra people and he has had enough people to have substitutes in years past but it is hard to recruit athletes to come play rugby.

Graziano said it is difficult to recruit people to come play college athletics in general, but if you throw in the facts that it’s not a well-known sport, it’s a rough game and there isn’t really anywhere to recruit from, it makes it even more difficult.

I mean, how many high school women’s rugby teams have you seen?

It’s not like the other sports where you hear about a kid that’s pretty good at the high school level and you go check them out; Graziano has to pay attention to all kinds of sports and see which kids have skills they could transfer onto the rugby field and then convince them to make that transfer.

“Then there’s the kids that don’t want to learn a whole new sport, or the crossover athletes that don’t want to jeopardize their other seasons,” Graziano said. “And the overall roughness of the game, it is just not that appealing to some.”

Graziano and the Panthers believe what they did here a little more than a week ago with the West Chester, the first-ever match up between two NCAA sanctioned schools, helps to make college rugby more appealing.

Junior center Molly Clutter said that a lot of people think of club rugby when they hear about it and they want to come and play something more serious than that.

“We just have to show them we are serious, this is NCAA and it has the structure of other real Division 1 sports,” Clutter said. “We are just trying to sell rugby by showing them that we are trying to go places.”

Jenkins said it not only is hard to play with one person down, much less four, but when someone goes out and there is no one else to come in everyone is worried about that gap that’s left.

“When that happens, you can’t stop thinking about that injury,” Jenkins said. “It’s like, ‘there is supposed to be someone there, are they going to be ok? Are they going to be able to play next week?’ But if you are able to put someone in, it sort of relieves all of that worrying.”

Besides the obvious problems of not having people to come in after injuries, there are many other problems with not having any substitutes.

Jenkins said having a few extra bodies to put in to give some people a little more breathing time, instead of playing non-stop would be beneficial at times.

In practice, Clutter said they have to play the game out in their head because they don’t really have enough people to scrimmage.

“We will be running plays and in the middle coach will blow the whistle and yell out ‘tackle’ and we will have to drop,” Clutter said. “He tells us ‘you would be tackled by now’ but it is really hard to have something that resembles a real game.”

So not only do these women play one of the toughest games I’ve ever seen but also they play with no subs and they don’t give up.

I think sometimes people don’t realize how hard these people work and how tough these athletes really are.