The Club
History
Approximately 1.5 million years ago: Homo erectus is born.
Approximately 40,000 BC: Cro-Magnon man is born. He learns to control fire, but not women.
2400 BC: Founding of the city of Babylon, original blueprints for Hanging Gardens thought to include space for rugby pitch.
331 BC: Alexander the Great marches through Asia, reported to have inspired the first rolling maul.
1066 AD: Duke William of Normandy crosses the Channel to invade England and defeats the Anglo-Saxon King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings. The English-French rugby rivalry is born.
Approximately 1500 AD: The Celts begin to play the native game of caid, a sport with strong similarities to rugby in that it involved a ball, a defined space, and a predetermined number of players. Interestingly, the word "caid" means "scrotum of the bull". It is later determined that caid did not have any influence on the evolution of rugby.
1823 AD: A student at the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England named William Webb Ellis "with fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game".
1871 AD: The Rugby Football Union is founded in the Pall Mall Restaurant on London's Regent Street with representatives from 21 local clubs attending, including Harlequins, St. Paul's School, and King's College. Representatives from the London club Wasps famously miss the meeting after reportedly arriving at another pub of the same name, consuming a number of drinks, and finishing the night too drunk to make it to the correct address once the mistake is realized.
1881 AD: The Wharton School is founded at the University of Pennsylvania. Future WRFC Co-Captain Jim Vesterman (WG '06) is born.
1978 AD: The Wharton Rugby Football Club is founded at the University of Pennsylvania. Ladies commence swooning.
Competition
For over 30 years, the Wharton Rugby Football Club has represented the University of Pennsylvania on the pitch in heated competition against American rivals such as the Harvard Business School, Stanford University GSB, and the Kellogg School at Northwestern, as well as international competition such as the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), the Smurfit School of Business at University College-Dublin, and the London Business School. The Wharthogs, or "Hogs" as we are known, have traditionally been among the strongest teams at their level in the United States and have experienced success in both national and international tournaments such as the MBA World Cup, held every spring at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
