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Spencer Pesce, 20, is the starting hooker for the University at Albany Men’s rugby club team. The great Danes started off their regular season with a 37-25 victory over Columbia University on Saturday, September 8th. Pesce is a junior at UAlbany from Manhattan, New York, who has played rugby since he was a freshman at Xavier High School. Now a junior at UAlbany, Pesce hopes this is the year that the Danes can make the playoffs and bring some attention to the team within the university. Interview: DYLAN: Spencer, thanks for taking time to talk to me.SPENCER: No problem Dylan, anytime.DYLAN: Let’s start off with yesterday’s regular season opener, you guys came up with the victory over Columbia University 37-25. That’s a big win to start the season off 1-0. What’d you guys do well to beat an Ivy League school fairly easily?SPENCER: Well, typically with the new scrum cadence, it’s been a very weird transition however we’ve been very good in the new transition. The forwards won every single scrum, which was very, very dominating. The backs did well of getting the ball to space and attacking that space and then once Columbia saw that we could spread the ball real wide, they had to respect that and that opened up a lot of lanes up the middle. DYLAN: So you guys had a strong second half then?SPENCER: Yes we did. DYLAN: The team had an alumni tailgate after the game right? That must have been a lot of fun, hanging out with older players especially after a big win?SPENCER: It was pretty fun, seeing Bryan, and Eddie, and Tyler.DYLAN: Some older players?SPENCER: Yeah, some good guys.DYLAN: Alright, well I want to get into your early life a little bit, I know you’re from New York City, but where exactly did you grow up and more importantly, what got you into playing rugby? That’s a pretty unique sport you don’t see a lot of younger people playing rugby.SPENCER: No you don’t. I grew up originally on the upper east side of Manhattan, but moved to Queens in 7th grade. Public high school is a very weird system in New York City, so me and a few of my friends didn’t get into any public high schools, so the alternative was to go to this all boys catholic school, Xavier. Little did I know, and one of my friends, that it was one of the top national programs in rugby. So we started off playing football, and the new coach that year was a former Penn State Rugby player who convinced a lot of us to play rugby in the spring to help us for the football season, so that got a lot of kids on board. The most freshman who wanted to play rugby that Xavier has seen in history, which started the first U15 freshman rugby team, which I was a part of, and we went undefeated in our first ever season of playing rugby. It really just took off from there. It was a fun ride.DYLAN: Following high school, were you looking to continue playing rugby in college?SPENCER: Yeah. Our later success on the varsity team, as one of my coaches put it, we were the “Lab Rat” team that we played together with each other every year. Our third year culminated in a National Championship victory. Then our senior, we were the only team to get back to the National finals, even though we lost. That success drove a lot of us to apply to top rugby schools. I didn’t get into any of them though.DYLAN: What schools were those?SPENCER: Penn State, Delaware, Utah, but anywhere I went I was going to play rugby no matter what.DYLAN: Now I heard your nickname is “Foopa,” want to elaborate on that?SPENCER: Alright, a lot of people know but we’ll finally go on record saying it. It was my sophomore year of high school, the super bowl where the Steelers were playing the Seahawks or the Cardinals, one of those Super Bowls, I had a Ben Roethlisberger jersey from like 6th grade which I was wearing that night. Me and my friends ordered 200 chicken wings, and there were like just six of us. Originally there was a new teacher at our school, that was a pretty heavy set woman and everyone joked saying she had a foopa, so the word was fresh in everybody’s head. Before halftime, I put down 60 chicken wings by myself and was sitting there in my friend’s recliner basically in a food coma, and the Ben Roethlisberger jersey was just rolling up my stomach, and my friend Dan got up and screamed, “He’s got a foopa!” Then all of my friends in the house just started chanting foopa, foopa, foopa. The next day at school, it just stuck.DYLAN: And it carried over to UAlbany?SPENCER: Sadly enough, Shane Jacobi found out my nickname and turned it against me.DYLAN: Alright, so you’re at UAlbany and during your freshman year two years ago, the team moved up to Division 1-AA and joined the East Coast Rugby Conference, how pumped were you as a freshman to find out you would be playing big universities like Boston College and UConn?SPENCER: I was pretty excited because generally speaking I heard that there wasn’t really a lot of competition that UAlbany faced. I knew a kid on Northeastern, a really good kid, and a really good kid on Boston College. Then the first game, league game, I ever played, as a freshman, starting, we beat Boston College 19-17, which was really, really exciting. DYLAN: They were Nationally ranked at the time right?SPENCER: They were 19th in the Nation.DYLAN: Huge win. Now being such a small university relative to the other teams in the conference when it comes to athletics. How does UAlbany rugby stay competitive especially when it comes to recruiting students to play?SPENCER: I think a lot of kids, they come out, they played football in high school, and they come to a division 1 school, where they don’t really have any aspirations to play football, and they see kids like me, and Sean Kimmins, and Gavin Gyimesi, or whatever, that’s how I say his last name. They see us throwing a ball around and like hitting each other and fooling around and they want to be a part of that and not maybe a football setting where its like a drill sergeant hammering kids, and football players, they’re great kids, but they really don’t get to enjoy college the same as other students because football practice takes up a lot of time. A new player on this team this year, Neil Maxwell, who was a football player last year, didn’t want to play again this year and now he’s basically starting on A-side because he’s an absolute monster. The same was the case with Andy Moth, who graduated last year, these football kids are tremendous athletes and they realize there’s another sport they can transition well into and they become even more of a superstar than they would’ve if they were on a football team.DYLAN: And the schedule’s not necessarily relaxed, but you guys only practice a handful of days a week, you’re not practicing 5 to 6 days a week. SPENCER: I would like to practice a little more to have more of a solid team chemistry but it doesn’t take up a lot of the week so we come out 3 times a week and really put in hard effort for two hours. That does help us in the long run.DYLAN: Now being a club team here at UAlbany, for me personally, I don’t hear too much news about the team, do you fee like the team is respected by the university?SPENCER: I don’t think the team is respected by the University at all, and that’s something that does sadden me because my friends at Penn State, their team is recognized by the university, they get a lot of glory, they’re always in the newspaper. DYLAN: Why do you think that is, because you’re a club team?SPENCER: Not necessarily that we’re a club team, there’s some schools in the nation that appreciate rugby. Some of my friends go to St. Joe’s University in Philadelphia, which is a program on the rise that’s been taking a lot of kids from my high school and now the university is starting to see that, so the university to starting to promote them all around the campus. It really just has to do with the school and the club being on certain terms. If the club does well and the school wants to promote it, I think it should. Another thing I think the school should promote the club is, not to hate on some schools, but the football team plays teams like Maine and Duquesne, and we’re playing Boston College, UConn and Syracuse. Those are the big names that I think if people saw a flyer, saying we’re playing Syracuse, not even knowing the sport, would like to go see an Albany team play Syracuse. DYLAN: Absolutely. So how do you guys without much university help, how do you guys get the word out around campus to get more people to care about the team and to come to games?SPENCER: Well I always try to have an Albany shoutout on my ATV TV show, “UA Overtime.” I’m also part of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity chapter around here, which I tell all the kids in the fraternity to come out and play and we’ve gotten a few of them. Mike Wolf, one of them, joined the team, he’s injured now, but he immediately got hooked on the sport and became a great player in the few weeks it took him to learn the sport. And we shout out the word in the Greek life setting all the time about rugby to try to get them to come to games. DYLAN: And I see you guys around campus all the time, you gotta wear the gear to put the word out there.SPENCER: With the new track suits it’s kind of hard to not want to wear them.DYLAN: Now you guys moved to a new field last spring, your home games are in front of State quad now as opposed to where they used to be, behind Dutch Quad, how’d you feel about the move and the new field?SPENCER: I like the new field a lot. It’s a lot wider, it’s a new asset to our game, to really spread the ball wide with the new field. The only problem is I don’t know if the grounds crew cuts that grass a lot because it was very, very thick in the last game we played but if the field settings are right, it’s a great location right next to state quad to get more freshman to come watch the games. It’s a pretty great field, I’m excited to play on it.DYLAN: Lets get back to this season though. The team struggled a little bit last year, you guys went 3-4, I know you’ve only had one regular season game so far, but you also have had two preseason games where you defeated Syracuse, but you lost to Brown in a close game, and after yesterday’s win over Columbia, how’s the team looking? What are you guys doing right, and what areas do you really need to improve?SPENCER: I think this is going to be a really good year for the team. We’re starting to practice more advanced fundamentals that previous seasons we really didn’t get to touch on like slide defense and having two players being able to cover 4 offensive players. There are fundamentals of the game we don’t really touch on and that’s why we lost to Brown. Brown was great at their coverage and their attack. If we can cover those fundamentals, we will have a very good shot this season. I also know a lot of the kids on some of the big name schools like Northeastern and Boston College have graduating players, and we still have a very heavy upperclassmen lineup which will be a very good advantage to this season.DYLAN: So what are the team goals for this year?SPENCER: My personal goal is that the team goes undefeated and we make the playoffs but haven’t had too much success with that in the past two seasons. But I think if we can finish over .500 as a reasonable goal, that would be a step in the right direction.DYLAN: What are your personal goals, other than making the playoffs, what do you want to do as a player?SPENCER: My college career hasn’t been as big as I wanted it to be so far. I’m hoping to make all-conference this year, join Gavin on that rank. DYLAN: You’re the starting hooker this year right?SPENCER: I am. The transition from tight head to hooker is going to be a big one so we’ll have to see what the new position holds for Spencer Pesce.DYLAN: You guys got a game coming up this weekend against Boston College. You guys have beaten them both times in the past two years since joining the conference. Are you guys going to get the 3-peat this Saturday?SPENCER: I guarantee we get the 3-peat this Saturday. I’m coming off of a separated shoulder injury, I’m cleared to play this week, so no mercy for anyone that gets in my way.DYLAN: Is there anything you want to say to the listeners?SPENCER: I really want to shout out UAlbany rugby. It’s a great sport, great team. We could use fans, we could use new players. Just come out and support the team, it’s going to be a fun year to get hooked on the UAlbany rugby way.DYLAN: What time does the game start Saturday so people know?SPENCER: Saturday, unfortunately is an away game at 1 p.m. in Boston. But next week, and it is a conflict on interest because its Larkfest, will be I want to say, the home opener because Syracuse was before a lot of people got to school, against Kutztown Rugby, which is a very, very top-tier powerhouse team in the nation. It should be a fun game. They’re very good so I don’t want to say we don’t have a chance, but chances might be slim but if the team gets fired up, it should be a very exciting game to watch.DYLAN: Hopefully some people come out for that then.SPENCER: Hopefully. DYLAN: Thanks again, Spencer. Good luck this weekend as the Great Danes take on Boston College at Boston College. It’s an away game, hopefully you guys get the victory. SPENCER: Hopefully we do.DYLAN: Thank you man.SPENCER: Thank you Dylan. ................
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