Tom Pfingsten
Special to The Village News
When Richelle Stephens sets foot on the Olympic stage next month in Brazil, it will be, for the 20-year-old Fallbrook native, the latest step in a journey that began with rugby tryouts at Potter Jr. High School six years ago.
Back in 8th grade, Stephens was a softball player. She’d participated in the Don Dornon track and field games at Fallbrook High School three times, and had never played a minute of rugby before that day at Potter.
“A friend of mine wanted to play, so she said, ‘Let’s go to tryouts.’ I thought it would be fun. She never showed up, so I went by myself, and I really liked it, because there was a lot of running hard, a lot of mental toughness,” Stephens recalled. “It’s a very strategic game – the big hits, getting laid out, that wasn’t my strong suit, but I loved to think and strategize.”
Stephens said her mom was less enthusiastic, for obvious reasons.
“We had to sign a waiver and she was like, ‘You’re pretty much signing your life away. If you get hurt or die, that’s it. We can’t do anything about it,’” she said. “I was like, ‘Okay. I’m doing it.’”
And she has been doing it for the past six years, playing rugby just about as well as any woman in the world. Stephens was riding in the car with her sister, on her way back to Fallbrook from the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, when she found out that she’d been selected for the Olympic team, known as the Eagles.
The confirmation came in an email from the coach, Richie Walker, and she calmly turned to her sister and shared the news that she would be one of 12 players traveling to Rio at the end of July.
“I’ve been wanting this for so long,” she said. “It made me feel peaceful, like all this hard work paid off. I told my sister, ‘I made the team,’ and she started freaking out. She did it all for me.”
It’s difficult to overstate the trajectory of Stephens’ athletic career, or the significance of being chosen to represent the US in this particular Olympic event. Men’s rugby was last played as an Olympic sport in 1924, and women’s rugby is a true Olympic novelty – something nobody was even imagining in 1924. Those watching Stephens and her teammates play their first match on Aug. 6 will watch history in the making.
Fallbrook Rugby: a success story
Stephens is not especially tall – 5’6”, to be exact – but she is exceptionally well-conditioned, as you would imagine any Olympic athlete to be in the weeks leading up to the Games.
The most endearing thing about Stephens, as her teammates would verify, is her modesty – that is, a combination of humility and hard work and a positive attitude. She seems more pleased with being part of the Olympic team than she is thrilled or impressed with the Olympic spectacle itself.
That modesty may come naturally, being the youngest player on the team, but a lot of it has to do with her roots as an athlete.
Stephens lettered in rugby all four years at Fallbrook High, and while during that time, the team was virtually unbeatable. She remembers playing in the national championship game that put Fallbrook on the map as a women’s rugby powerhouse.
“I got one penalty for us,” she said. “A girl grabbed my hair and pulled me down – that’s the only thing I can remember.”
After that landmark win in 2011, even though she was only a freshman, she said, “I remember feeling so pumped and so proud of what we accomplished. We worked so hard.”
The following year, her life as a rugby player would take a radical new course when Walker, the Team USA coach, scouted Stephens at a tournament in Philadelphia.
“Right from the start, he asked if I was interested in going to the Olympics,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘I never even thought about it. But I am interested.’”
Walker invited Stephens and a Fallbrook teammate to join the team at the training center, and she remembers feeling terrified. She was 15 years old, practicing with women – some twice her age – who are now her Olympic teammates.
“We were definitely the smallest, and that was before there were rules about age, so there were full-grown women tackling us, and we were trying to tackle them,” said Stephens. “It was so bad.”
Back in Fallbrook, she was taking on an increasingly important role with the Warriors.
“It started out as a joke—‘Oh, here’s our future Olympian,’” said Stephens. “But it became very real very fast.”
Her first major setback came in 2013, in the form of a torn medial collateral ligament in her knee. That injury came back to haunt her during her senior year, when she was named captain of the team but only played two games before her knee went out again.
By the time she graduated last summer, the Olympics were just around the corner. A year of training and some good luck were all that separated her from the largest imaginable stage. But she still wouldn’t know until a few weeks before departure whether she was good enough.
The game itself
When folks hear about Fallbrook’s dominance in women’s rugby, they invariably ask either, “Why Fallbrook?” or, “Why rugby?”
In Stephens is the answer to both questions.
She is tough. Softball was too tame for her. She represents dozens of other girls her age who were also tough and brought a physical intensity to the field that would have been wasted on many other, more traditional girls sports. It is uncertain whether Fallbrook produces more than its share of tough girls or rugby just hasn’t caught on elsewhere, but Stephens is the perfect storm of traits that make the ideal rugby player.
More important, though, is the culture of the game. Rugby teams are families. Between Fallbrook’s tight-knit atmosphere and the husband-wife coaching duo Craig and Marin Pinnell, this town has fielded the nation’s finest girls rugby team for years now.
“The culture of rugby is just different from any other sport I’ve played,” Stephens explained. “People respect each other on the field. I don’t know how football is, but in rugby, no one is out to actually hurt you. You want to tackle safely out of courtesy for the other player – you hit them hard, but you do it properly so that no one gets hurt.”
When she plays, Stephens puts her long blonde hair up in a bun; otherwise it would cover her number. She plays several positions for Team USA, including fly-half, scrum-half and center.
“I’m not the fastest back, but I’m not the slowest, either,” said Stephens.
Stephens played her first tournament with Team USA in Dubai last year; since then, she has racked up 37 points in four tournaments.
In Rio, the team is guaranteed at least three games, no matter what happens. In the same pool as Team USA are Australia, Fiji and Colombia.
“Depending on how we play against them, we get a certain amount of points – if you win, you get two points, if you lose you get zero, and if you draw, you each get one,” she explained.
This all leads up to the quarterfinal game, which is a really big deal to win, said Stephens.
Because women’s rugby is so new, the odds of medaling are not as settled as in other team sports. Australia, New Zealand, England and Canada all have strong teams, but Stephens was asked which team is the best, she snapped back with a grin, “USA.” (She also shrugged off any concerns about the Zika virus, saying simply, “Achieving your dream? Or worrying about a virus?”)
As is the way with the breathless, broadcast-oriented Olympic schedule, women’s rugby will wrap up in three days, Aug. 6-8. By the 9th, Stephens could be an Olympic medalist.
After two weeks in Brazil, Stephens will come home to Fallbrook before driving out to college at Lindenwood University in Missouri, where she has a scholarship to play rugby while studying to be a firefighter and paramedic, her ultimate career goal.
But right now, clearly, every fiber in her body is focused on her performance in Rio.
“My biggest concern is leaving the field with regret,” she confided. “If I didn’t play hard enough. You know? When you don’t leave it all out there? But I think I will, because everybody will. I just want to play really hard.”
The hometown Olympian
On a cold Saturday in February 2012, Stephens joined her Fallbrook teammates and coaches on the field at Warriors Stadium to listen to a man named Bill Parkinson describe the last Olympic game of rugby, played in Paris in 1924. The American team, underdogs by all accounts, consisted entirely of players from California, and that day they beat the French team 17-3 to take the gold medal. Parkinson held up a frame. His second cousin had been the captain of that team, and this was his medal.
The Fallbrook girls craned their necks for a glimpse while Craig and Marin Pinnell scanned their faces. For many of these teenagers, rugby was simply the best sport to play – the most fun. They weren’t thinking about the Olympics. How many of them even knew where Rio de Janeiro was?
After nearly a century, Parkinson said, “They’re talking about bringing it back.”
Marin Pinnell added it would possibly be in Brazil, 2016. Back then, four years seemed like an eternity to these young girls.
Then Pinnell’s husband, a South African who would go on to lead the Fallbrook team to several consecutive national championships, said, “Some of you are the right age for that. Seriously, it can be a goal for you.”
Maybe the seed of hope was planted in Stephens’ competitive heart that day.
But wherever it came from, the drive to play better – to run faster and hit harder – hasn’t let up yet.
“I honestly don’t know if I’m ever going to play on a team like that again, because everybody loved each other,” she said, referring to the Fallbrook Warriors. “It really was like playing with a bunch of sisters. It felt so good every time we played on the field.”
From this distance and over the airwaves, most have very little hope of knowing what’s going through the mind of an Olympic sprinter or an Olympic diver or an Olympic anyone at the moment of truth.
But watch Stephens closely, and it’s easy to figure out what she’s thinking about between the scrums and tries, in the background, when flashes of high school rugby come back to her.
She’s thinking about the sisters who taught her not just how to win, but what to love about winning.
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