The members of the South Buffalo Rugby Club’s women’s team are keenly familiar with the whole notion of “with you.”
Those two words are what a player, sprinting hard with the ball, will often hear shouted by a teammate just behind her – a heat-of-the-moment reminder that you are not alone as you race downfield.
The expression also became a rallying cry about the game’s enduring strength during the pandemic, an affirmation of support in a time when players missing the up-close communion of a relentless contact sport had to deal with long months of distanced isolation.
Yet for the South Buffalo women, still unbeaten in their most successful season in club history, those words now intertwine with fierce loyalty to a former teammate, Carley Doyle.
“With everything she’s gone through? That’s such a fighter,” said Kelly DeGrood, captain since 2020. “People say rugby is tough? With her, that’s a whole other level, right there.”
Doyle – a leukemia patient in recovery from a blood stem cell transplant – describes the reaction of her old teammates as indicative of the greatest lesson of her struggle.
“I’ve had this overwhelming feeling,” she said, “of being loved.”
That was made obvious, she said, when her younger sister Morgan donated the blood stem cells for her transplant. Or with every one of the more than 50 transfusions Doyle received, each involving community blood donations that helped keep her alive. Or with kindnesses – large and small – from countless people, such as a landlord who learned of her sickness, then immediately freed…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply