Before Mike Leach was a renowned football coach, the BYU rugby team was his family, and he did anything for “the boys.” Usually, to Leach’s delight, it ended in some crazy tale.
Mike Leach, pictured here on a page from the 1981 BYU Banyan yearbook, was a member of the Cougars' nationally ranked rugby team during his time in college.Mike Leach is standing on the roof of a building on a mink farm, hammer in one hand, nails in the other, shouting something about Geronimo.
And if you knew Mike Leach, you knew that, as sure as a mink farm stinks, he would say yes immediately to anything one of his BYU rugby teammates asked. Didn’t matter what it was. Before Leach was a renowned football coach, the Cougars’ rugby team was his family, and he did anything for “the boys.”The tales of Leach’s college days on the BYU rugby team would be told again and again among his coach and old teammates.
From mink farms to long van rides, Leach was allowed the space to become what the world would eventually know him as: somebody who wanted to do things out of the ordinary, inquire about anything, and be unencumbered by convention. He built a tight-knit band of unlikely brothers who facilitated and supported his style. At each stop in his career, they were there somewhere in the background.
But this trip was an exception. Some of the players had a test that morning and couldn’t leave on time with the others in the van, so rugby player Cal Sistrunk offered to drive the remaining guys in his new car and catch up with the team by dusk. The team was quite literally a team of misfits. Some were former soccer players, others former football players. The coach, John Seggar, didn’t care.
Leach himself was a smaller guy, playing right winger. But he was fast and ended up being a solid role player.The success, though, was not why people did it. It was for the family. When they traveled, the team was broken up into married men and single men. And those single men, which Leach was a part of, did everything and anything together.
Leach, without any pretext, told Salisbury to buy a plane ticket to Lubbock and come to a practice. He would teach him how to implement the air raid offense for a bunch of 8-year-olds. And Leach remained loyal to them. He went to BYU’s first rugby national championship appearance in 2009 with his 1981 team. He organized an impromptu rugby game on the beach for some of the guys. It was his comfort zone.
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