SASC Profile: Yale Women’s Rugby Player Mahima Kodavati YC ‘25

Rugby, Mahima Kodavati YC ’25 explains to me, can be a little counterintuitive. The forwards play defense. The backs play offense. And a try is a goal, not just an attempt at one.

In matches, Mahima plays either lock or prop. Lock is a forward position responsible for holding the defense steady in a scrum and catching the ball in a lineout. Prop is another forward position that supports the players trying to grab the ball in a scrum or a lineout. Both roles require height, strength, and an enthusiasm for bruising close contact competition, which Mahima grinningly admits she has. “I really enjoy being able to tackle,” she tells me. But lock and prop are also supporting roles, ceding the limelight to nimble backs who rush down the field to score tries.

That, Mahima says, is okay with her. She emphasizes that playing defensive positions makes her feel like part of something bigger than herself. “It’s really fun for me to be a support player. A lot of the time, support players are overlooked. But being a support player is so important to making sure the team is winning. I’ve been the person who’s been the reason so many tries succeed—I’ve made the tackle, gotten the ball, and offloaded to someone who’s going to run and make that try. And I feel like that’s possible because our team is very, very close and very inclusive.”

The team Mahima is talking about is Yale Women’s Rugby, Yale University’s club rugby team. Since there is no NCAA Division I rugby offered at Yale, club teams are the highest level of competition for the sport. Yale Women’s Rugby plays two variants of rugby: the standard game, with 15 players on the field, and rugby sevens, with seven players. In sevens, Mahima plays prop; otherwise, she plays lock.

Rugby has a global audience of millions of fans. The last Rugby World Cup, held in Japan in 2019, attracted 857 million viewers. But in the United States, despite burgeoning enthusiasm for the game in the last two decades, rugby remains a niche sport. Like almost all of her teammates, Mahima started playing rugby in college. In high school she played soccer, ran cross country and track, and practiced martial arts. As a soccer player, she was accomplished enough to captain her high school team and receive NCAA Division III offers. But, she says, “I decided not to go that route because I didn’t really want to play a sport in college at the varsity level. A lot of people who play a sport at that level have dreamed about it for their entire lives. That was never a dream of mine.”

Despite deciding against playing a varsity sport, Mahima was still planning to play club soccer at Yale—until she unexpectedly found her way to rugby. “I was at the extracurricular bazaar my first year, and the rugby and club soccer teams were right next to each other. I was walking away from the club soccer table and the rugby captain at the time called me over saying, ‘Put your name down, put your name down.’” Driven by curiosity, Mahima did. Soon after her first rugby practice, she realized that after 12 years, she would no longer be playing soccer. “I think at that point I was a little over soccer. Rugby was new, it was different, and I was decent at it even at the first practice. It was just something I felt like I could explore and find new interests and people through.”

Mahima’s willingness to try rugby, which she describes as having a reputation for being “rough and reckless,” is more than a little unusual in the South Asian American community she grew up in. Asian Americans as a whole make up over 7% of the American population, but only around 1% of players in the major leagues of the most popular American sports (American football, baseball, basketball, and hockey). Much of this, especially for South Asian women, may be cultural. Mahima says that even though she’s been an athlete for most of her life, her parents still have reservations about her playing sports. “South Asian narratives are that women shouldn’t be playing tough sports, and rugby is definitely a tough sport. My mom was a little iffy about me playing soccer, and she’s iffy about me playing rugby. And I think that’s because the way South Asian women are characterized by society focuses on them being frailer or needing protection.” Mahima, laughing a little, says that the only way she got away with playing sports growing up was because “My mom wanted to make sure I was doing extracurricular activities, but I couldn’t dance or sing. Sports were her only option.”

As was true on her high school soccer, track, and cross country teams, Mahima is the only South Asian on the rugby team. But she says she rarely notices, crediting the team’s inclusivity and openness to players of all backgrounds and experiences. When we spoke about diversity in rugby, she pointed out that the biggest obstacle to diversity may come down to perceptions of the sport. “For us,” she told me, “a lot of diversifying still depends on a person’s family background and experiences making them open to playing. And I don’t know that everyone wants to play rugby.”

So why does she keep playing? The answer brings her back to soccer. Mahima says that on the occasions when she does miss playing soccer, it’s because of the community that she built within the sport over more than a decade of play. By the time she was varsity captain of her high school team, “all the younger girls were very much like my younger sisters and I was very much their big sister,” she says. But she also explains that soccer is intimately tied to her hometown. She feels like starting rugby in college allowed her to connect a new set of experiences with a new sport.

Now, “the reason why I keep coming back to rugby and continue to play rugby as a sport is because of the community that’s there.” And for Mahima, that community keeps growing. In the year since Mahima joined the team, women’s rugby has gone from around 20 players to almost 50. Off the pitch, the team watches rugby matches together, holds social events, and holds lifts on Mondays, practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and games on Saturdays. Mahima says the schedule’s mix of sport and social events creates opportunities for players to bond with each other and build friendships that go beyond the team. Part of the team’s tight-knit nature may be due to Mahima herself. Grace Dietz YC ’24, one of the women’s rugby co-captains for 2023–2024, told me, “I’m so lucky to have Mahima on the team as I’ve seen her grow into a leader on and off the pitch. Not only does she connect people, she connects to people. I’ve learned a lot from her ability to adapt on the field as well as the kindness and joy she brings to each practice.”

The warmth is mutual. Mahima emphasizes that she feels like there are many more people looking out for her on and off the rugby pitch than in her previous sports. “In high school I had coaches who were like, ‘I don’t care if you’re hurt, you’re still going to play.’ But on the rugby field my coaches say, ‘If you’re hurt, let’s sit out and let’s talk about it. You come first and your health comes first.’ I have not been injured at all in my time playing rugby, but I had two concussions from playing soccer.”

That rugby team’s closeness has been fostered through unique opportunities like a recent trip to France, where 19 players from the team spent ten days during Yale’s spring break. While traveling, the team played two matches. The first was against a club team in Miramas, a commune of some 25,000 people in France’s Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. Mahima says the heart-warming experience showed her just how much of a community there can be in rugby. “Miramas was such a good experience because the mayor came out and watched our game. There were so many people who came and watched and were excited to see us. And what really allowed us to see how big of a deal rugby was training and having lunch with the Miramas team. At lunch there were little kids, there were parents, there were grandparents. Everyone was really excited to get to know us and show us around.” Even after the match, which Yale lost by one point, the Miramas community had prepared cookies and food. “Every time we didn’t have a piece of food in our hands, they’d ask us, ‘Why don’t you have any food?’ and make sure we ate more.” The warm welcome the team received in Miramas, as well as at HEC Paris, where Yale played that university’s team, reaffirmed Mahima’s love of the game and the community that’s born from it. “I think in the past year I’ve been a little less committed to rugby and France really made me want to recommit, refocus, and really give a lot more of my time to the team.”

When I asked her what her proudest moment on the rugby team was, Mahima mentioned making her first try—a rarity for a defensive player—during her first year on the team as her on-the-field highlight. But it was clear that the real highlight was the team’s raucous celebration as a result, and the pride and excitement they showed in her achievement. As for off the field, Mahima says that came on the France trip, when during team-building activities she was characterized as “someone who’s always happy and always has a smile on her face. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s really nice to know that people think of me that way.”

Byline: Daevan Mangalmurti