Tammy Cowan Finds Her People Through Rugby

 

Her game-day ritual is simple. Tammy Cowan, men’s rugby coach at St. John’s University in Collegeville, starts at her favorite breakfast place, Kay’s Kitchen, where she has eggs, hash browns, crispy bacon (no toast, she notes), and coffee.

On other days, she invites players via group text: “First four to respond, I buy breakfast.” She says it’s a fun way to get to know new team members.

A longtime leader in women’s rugby, Tammy has played a pivotal role in shaping Minnesota’s rugby community. She is the chair of the Minnesota Rugby Referee Society. Through that work, she partners with USA Rugby Referees on its Pathways Committee, helping develop officials who want to move up the ladder. She also coaches at St. John’s, where rugby remains central to her life.

 

Discovering the Game

Cowan’s introduction to the sport came unexpectedly. “My best friend played rugby at St. John’s. In my senior year at Augsburg University, I was a tennis player. They cut the tennis team from the budget,” she says. Her friend knew someone starting a rugby team at St. Catherine University. “That’s back when you didn’t have to go there to play on a team. I literally got dragged out to my first practice. Three days later, I played in my first game, and I was hooked.”

When Cowan attended Minneapolis South High School, she played tennis and, as she puts it, “really poor basketball.” She laughs as she describes her style of play. “I wasn’t any good, but I was basically like a defensive thug. They would put me in to follow our opponent’s best players, but I also fouled out a lot.”

Rugby offered something that surprised her. “I got to hit people,” she says. “That’s why rugby is so great: it is the only true contact sport for women.”

Rugby also offered acceptance. She grew up active, but her size wasn’t always an asset. “I was finally able to use my size for what I think it was meant for — to play rugby. It was a gift.”

Travel for rugby, she notes, has been another gift. “I’ve literally been around the world with some of them — international tours, weddings, funerals, everything. They’re your extended family.”

Building Women’s Rugby in Minnesota

While on the St. Kate’s team, driving back to Saint Paul from a match in Saint Cloud, “five players decided to start a team. None of us knew anything. We were just happy when we had 15 players for a game.”

By the summer of 1982, Cowan had helped found the Twin Cities Amazons, the women’s senior club competing in USA Rugby’s Midwest Premiership Division 1. She played from 1982 until her retirement in 2006; that fall she joined the St. John’s men’s coaching staff. Tammy earned USA Rugby’s Competitive Coach of the Year honor in 2014 and guided the Johnnies to small college national titles in 2013 and 2014.

During her years as an Amazon player, Cowan coached at Gustavus Adolphus College (1985–1987), the College of St. Benedict (1990–1996), and St. Cloud State (1999–2006). She says she is seeing more women coaching at higher levels.

With the move to St. John’s, Cowan became the first woman in Minnesota to coach a men’s college rugby team.

She believes the sport’s greatest gift is empowerment. “We jokingly call the rugby team at St. John’s the Island of Misfit Toys,” she says. “People find their people. Every class, every race, every everything — rugby brings them together.”

Although rugby’s popularity is growing, Cowan says it remains a fringe sport in the United States. She lives in the St. Cloud area, where families have begun building a youth rugby league for kindergarten through eighth grade. The goal is to build feeder programs for high school teams.

Cowan says camaraderie is central to the sport’s culture. “I have two groups of non-rugby friends,” she explains. “I ride my bike every summer in Iowa, doing RAGBRAI [an annual seven-day bicycle ride across the state]. And then I have my group of teacher friends. But beyond that, everybody I travel with, everybody I hang out with, everything I do is with rugby people.”

Rugby has taken her to New Zealand, Australia, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Amsterdam, Italy, and France. As a coach, she has organized trips with the St. John’s team to Ireland, England, Wales, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas. The team makes efforts to do a service project at each stop, including fixing playgrounds.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

If you’re at Kay’s Kitchen and happen upon Cowan and some of the Johnnies’ players, she would tell you, “I don’t think I’ve done anything that spectacular. I got a lot of my leadership skills from my teammates when I played for the Amazons.”

Of her appreciation for the sport, she says, “The game has given me so much. I want players to respect the game and do the same — give back what they get out of it.”

 

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