The Bozeman Women’s Rugby Club took the field Tuesday evening at the old Miller Horse Arena on North 19th, where the scent of hay still lingers beneath the new sod. Twenty-three players ran lines through drizzle that felt more like September than August. The arena hosted cutting horse competitions until 2022, when the property sold to a developer who held it for eighteen months before the city purchased it for fields.
Head coach Mara Lindquist, who moved here from Missoula in 2019 and works nights at the emergency department, watched from the sideline in a rain jacket soaked through at the shoulders. She said the club has grown from twelve committed players to thirty-four in three years. Most work two jobs. Three are MSU students who will leave in December. Two are nurses who schedule shifts around match weekends.
“The line holds when the forwards show up,” Lindquist said. “Everything else is noise.”
The forwards showed up Tuesday. Props Kayla Dorn and Jess Reyes, both Belgrade natives who commute from Four Corners, drove the scrum machine backward five meters on the first rep. The machine is a welded steel sled the club built in Dorn’s garage using pipe from her uncle’s fencing supply. It sits on a trailer parked behind the arena next to a portable toilet the city provides April through October.
Backs practiced kicking into the wind that funnels down the Gallatin Valley from Livingston. Flyhalf Sarah Chen, a physical therapist who treats half the roster at her clinic on West Main, landed three of five touchfinders inside the five-meter line. The other two bounced off the chain-link fence where horses once waited their turn in the chute.
Parents sat in folding chairs along the touchline. Some brought thermoses. One father, a rancher from Manhattan, measured the field in strides and nodded. He said it felt right. The club plays its first match Saturday against Helena at the fairgrounds. The forecast calls for sun and seventy degrees.
The arena lights flickered on at seven thirty. Practice ended at eight. Players walked to their cars in the gravel lot, mud on their calves, talking about work tomorrow.