The Augusta Rugby Club has its origins as a brainchild of Jim Macmillan (A.K.A. “Jim Rugby” - now a family practice physician in Asheville, NC.) 1973 was Jim’s freshman year at the Medical College of Georgia.  Having played scrumhalf for Clemson University Rugby Club, Jim’s idea was that a rugby club at MCG would serve as a needed diversion for medical students, many of whom were former collegiate athletes bogged down in studies. Jim joined up with his classmate, Danny Ferguson, a former Princeton University rugger in the Fall of that year to organize and coach the club.

The first match was against Clemson, at Clemson, in December of that year. The second match was against the University of GA in Athens. Despite its recent creation, the team made a good showing in both matches. Recruits were added over the Christmas holidays and by the Spring of 1974, the MCG “MD’s” (Mad Dogs) fielded a respectable team. Most of the original team was made up of MCG medical students. Mike Harrison, Clay Smallwood and Bill Welsh were part of that original team and still play with our Old Boys team. In those formative years practice was held on the back side of the baseball field at Paine College. Our colors were Navy Blue and Gold.

The Spring season brought our first home game which was played at the Augusta Prep soccer field. The field was converted to a rugby pitch by the felling of six young, relatively straight pine trees to fashion goal posts. However, the Prep principal wasn’t too happy about the felling of the saplings from the surrounding woods. The fact that someone unrelated to our team had “spun doughnuts” with a car on the field the night before the match also didn’t help and that ended our first home pitch. We lost that spirited match 12-15, but the members of the team were so enthusiastic about how we played that a dynasty was in the making.

We played many venues those first two years until 1975 when unrelenting MCG administration arm twisting resulted in the acquisition of a home pitch right there on campus. The pitch was located between the site of the present day Mullins Lab off Walton Way and The Radiation Center on Saint Sebastian Way. That area, formerly a residential area known as “Frog Hollow,” had been leveled by the City of Augusta to allow for expansion of the Medical Center. We had to clean up glass and debris to make the field playable. The Pitch was named after “Jim Rugby”. It only lasted one year, however, before MCG claimed it back. We changed our colors to Royal Blue, Grey and White and adopted our first team patch - a royal blue background with a Skull (from our class rings) in front of a Staff of Aesculapius (from our yearbook.) Being on campus exposed the team to the School of Nursing which produced a stream of fairer sex fans and ensured the recruitment of new players from the medical school.  During those years “Squeaky” Johnson’s Tip Top Grill on Central and Monte Sano Avenues served as our unofficial clubhouse and watering hole.

Around that time Edouard Servy returned to Augusta from an OB-GYN practice in Bayonne, France to begin his residency at MCG. Edouard had played with Aviron Bayonnais - one of France’s top teams. Once Edouard agreed to coach our team, the quality of our play skyrocketed. We entered our first Rugby Tournament - The Hilton Head Classic in 1976 and WON! We beat the University of Maryland team in the Final. Edouard introduced top level techniques to our team which eventually were to be copied by the teams we routinely beat.

We played wherever we could find a vacant field after that - including Richmond Academy’s far southeast field which now has a softball field, and the field that was then in front of University Hospital and is the current site of University’s Outpatient Surgery Center. We then moved our matches to Richmond Academy’s football practice field which we used for several years. That field with its dim, but present lights served as our Tuesday and Thursday 7:00 -9:00PM practice field for many years as well. Thursday night practices were always well attended as everyone would end up at Squeaky’s to get “tanked up” for the weekend matches!

The Richmond Academy Field was the best we could do, but it was not laid out for Rugby. Being a high school football practice field the goal posts are set at the back of the end zones rather than at the front as are Rugby goal posts. The result being an inter-post distance of 120 yards instead of 100 meters. That would have been acceptable except that at the eastern end of the pitch the goal posts were situated almost on the running track which made for hard landings in the try zone. Attempting to limit injuries, the try line was moved 10 yards in front of the goal posts. That resulted in many missed trys over the years with players running to the posts only to realize they had run through the try zone and out of play - NO SCORE! It was a slight home pitch advantage though!

To add to the team’s woes - at the southwestern 22 meter line there was were several sink holes that we had to make sure were filled with sand to prevent broken legs. There was also a manhole cover just about in the same location for which we had to shorten the width of the pitch. The manhole was just outside the touchline and so we had to cover it with carpet remnants to make sure no one being tackled on the sideline would end up with a cracked skull. At that time a new, better quality patch was designed with navy blue and gold design on a royal blue background.

In the early 1980's the player composition of the team began to change. The medical student mix began a decline while the number of rugby playing Fort Gordon soldiers and engineers being transferred into the area’s nuclear plants augmented our team. It was decided to change the team name to the Augusta Rugby Football Club. The mascot continued to be the “Mad Dogs.” The name change necessitated a new blazer crest. The design incorporated the original logo to the left, but added an azalea bloom on the right side to represent the Garden City. The two are separated by a golf club signifying the importance of that sport to the community. The crest sits atop a rugby ball. The banners are gold with navy lettering. Our competitiveness rose to higher levels. In 1984 we went 12-0 for the first time beating all the Atlanta and South Carolina teams. We were winning the Palmetto Union Championship and the Jim Duffy Tournament every year.

Between 1980 and 1991 the team made five European tours playing in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, Belgium and Spain. We also twice hosted teams from France and once from Wales here in Augusta. In the early 1980's we were able to negotiate an agreement with Aquinas High School where we would help the school maintain its football field and repair its pressbox if we could play our home matches in that stadium. The stadium was ideal. There was plenty of room for try zones beyond the goal posts and the sidelines could be extended 5 meters on either side to make for the regulation 65 meter Rugby pitch width as opposed to the 55 yard football field width.

1986 was the founding year of our Old Boys club - The Archiball Association, USA. The Association had its origins in La Rochelle, France in the 1970's, but has since expanded to Bordeaux, Biarritz, Toulouse, Tahiti, Guiana, the Antilles and Argentina, as well as our USA branch.  As the Association was originated by a group of architects, the mascot is nature’s architect - the “Beaver”. To maintain the tradition, our first president was Ricky Clanton., an architect in Hilton Head, South Carolina.  Our Archiball team won the first tournament it entered: The Citrus Bowl Tournament in Orlando. It also twice won the Annual St. Patrick’s Tournament in Savannah. Lately, the team has toured France, Ireland, Brazil, Argentina and New Zealand. A tour is planned for 2010 to South Africa. An annual Archiball versus the Augusta Men’s Club has become a tradition. The Archiball, USA blazer crest is a beret wearing Beaver on a red, white and blue banner.

The arrangement with Aquinas High School persisted through the 80's and the 90's, but somehow in the new century we were negotiated off the field and were once again homeless.

We were back to Richmond Academy and the aforementioned adverse conditions. The next several years had us in search of the ideal replacement. We thought we found it in the soccer field at the Augusta State Athletic Complex on the Wrightsboro Road ASU Campus.  The pitch was regulation size, but necessitated moving the soccer goals, erecting goal posts before each match and taking them down afterwards. If any other event was scheduled at the Complex, the University did not want us playing at the same time - even though the Pitch was on a different field than the other event. Those conditions have necessitated playing matches as far away as Aiken’s polo fields at times - not good for the Augusta Rugby Club!

A few years ago Mike Harrison began negotiating with the Augusta/Richmond County Recreation Department about a lease to the Club of an underused softball field on Woods Street near Lake Olmstead Stadium. Though Mike was able to negotiate the lease, raising the funds necessary to renovate the softball field into a Rugby pitch was difficult. The renovations were finally begun in 2008 after start up funds were raised.

Finalization was ensured by the intervention of the Don Bray family in their desire to be a part of a Rugby pitch dedicated to their son and brother, Larry Douglas Bray, who was tragically lost in an automobile accident June 9, 2007. Larry, a Westside High School athlete and graduate was a second row player for the ARFC. A Mentor Corporation Regional Sales Manager, Larry was transferred from Augusta to Jacksonville, Florida where he played for that city’s Rugby Club.