No results from 1987–88 have reached us. What has reached us is a pair of tournament programs from the spring of 1988, and they carry more about the club than their page count suggests.
The first is the program for the XVI Annual Omaha Rugby Festival, played April 9 and 10, 1988 at Dodge Park in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a milestone year for the tournament: for the first time the collegiate sides were drawn in a bracket of their own rather than mixed in with the club sides, a change Omaha RFC president Steve Grunberg explained was meant to let the tournament grow to twelve clubs in each half. Missouri went into the eight-team collegiate draw alongside Kansas State, Creighton, Iowa, Northern Iowa, Iowa State, South Dakota and Nebraska, and opened against the University of Nebraska at 11:15 on the Saturday morning on the Green Field. Matches were 25 minutes a half, the two finals 30, and the captains met at nine o’clock Saturday at Dodge Park. The program is a pre-tournament draw, so it records where Missouri started and nothing about how the weekend ended.
The second is Mizzou’s own program for Beach Party ’88, and it marks the moment the club’s spring party became a proper tournament. “This is the first year that Beach Party has been expanded into a large tournament,” club president Dan Cotta wrote in his welcome. “In the past, we had a small tournament, and a small party. This year we have a large tournament and a very large party.” Rugby was at Reactor Field, Friday night was at Bye Georges off Providence Road, and a shuttle bus ran between the pitches and the Saturday party site from two in the afternoon until nine at night. Shakespeare’s Pizza sold pizza at the party, and visiting clubs were asked to keep alcohol off the University fields. Reed Roussel, Don Grace and Tom Mohan organized it. The event outlasted them all: the club was still playing Beach Party over the first weekend of May four years later.
The Beach Party program also prints the club’s full officer slate for 1988 — Dan Cotta as president, Michael Dorigan as vice-president, Tom Mohan as secretary, Mike Sampson as treasurer, Don Grace as captain, Reed Roussel as faculty advisor and Ian Hermann as coach — and gives Hermann a page of his own, thanking “the Greatest Coach in Missouri” for seven years of work. Seven years back from 1988 is 1981, which matches what Hermann told The Maneater in 1983 about how he found the club. The captain is a familiar name too: Don Grace had been the 145-pound scrum half profiled in the 1983–84 student paper, and five years on he was leading the side.
One more thread runs back through the archive. The inside back cover carries an advertisement for Marathon Copier Exchange of Columbia, signed off “Good luck Mizzou Rugby — Greg Wolff, President.” Wolff was the club’s 5-foot-5 fullback and kicker in 1983–84. By 1988 he was running a business on Tenth Street and buying an ad in his old club’s program.
Both programs are pre-tournament: they print the draw and the arrangements, never the outcome. If you played either weekend and remember how Missouri finished, the form below is the place to tell us.
