Michaela Adams 12 is a female rugby player who plays for the Palmer Terrors, a high school rugby team for boys and girls that is sponsored by District 11 and Palmer High School. She has been playing rugby for a year a half and was inspired to begin playing by her dad, who played in college, and her two brothers, who started playing in middle school.

Since Adams is involved in a dual season sport, she plays different variations of the sport depending on the season she is in. Her fall season consists of a team of seven players and her summer season has a team of 15 players. She plays wing when her team plays sevens, and she plays center and fullback when the team plays 15.

“My favorite thing is probably scoring because I’m one of the fastest girls because a lot of the girls are bigger so they can tackle hard. My least favorite thing is when you get tackled and bang your head on the ground because I have almost had three concussions this year,” Adams said.

The team qualified for state and had an increased fitness routine for the two months leading up to state. Their conditioning consisted of running four minute sprints under a pre-established time, doing as many push-ups as possible in two minutes and holding ten-minute planks.

“We had more practices than we normally had and they were two hours long instead of an hour and a half,” Adams said. “At state we had about half the team get injured, so we did not perform how we wanted to. It was pretty bad, but we had positive attitudes.”

Adams plans on continuing her career of playing rugby after high school. She has been looking into different colleges to play at and has recently been in contact with them about playing for their teams. One of her rugby role models is Michaela Blyde who plays for the New Zealand Black Ferns. Adams is inspired by how Blyde has not been playing rugby for a long time, yet she is already considered one of the ‘best of the best.’

Although she has not been playing for a long time, Adams feels her rugby career has been quite successful thus far. Adams is also a soccer player and said that when she first learned to play rugby she realized she would begin knocking people down on her team. After realizing she was incorporating rugby into her soccer, she wanted to put it to good use and continue learning to play rugby and what goes into playing it.

“I think rugby is a mental thing, mostly, because obviously there is a physical toll with tackling people, getting tackled, and running all of the time; but I know that if you let the other team get inside your head, like if they score before you, then it all goes downhill from there. You have to just keep your head in the game more than your body,” Adams said.