Our Story

Lamorinda Rugby Football Club was started in 1980 by Pat Vincent, a former captain of the New Zealand All Blacks. He had come to California in 1967 to teach, and was offered a rugby coaching job at St Mary’s College. He was as well known for his singing as for his rugby, and he captained the All Blacks in 1956 against the Springboks.

The first Lamorinda high school team was called the Vincent’s. As was the custom in those days the second side took an amusing and slightly derogatory name, and their coach had taken to calling his players the Rodents. When most of the Vincent’s graduated in 1981 the Rodent players became the core of the first team, and they kept the name. It has been ours ever since. Pat Vincent coached until 1983, when he died of a heart attack on the flight home from a tour of Scotland with his St Mary’s side.

Between 1980 and 2001 Lamorinda was purely a high school team, and every single season the coaches and players had to go out and recruit enough bodies to field a side. In 2002 Tony McKenzie put an expansion plan to the committee so that players would flow up into the high school program instead of the club reinventing itself every year. The youth program started in 2003 under Glen Dickens with one Under 14 team, added Under 12 and Under 10 in 2004 under Matt Taylor, and Under 8 in 2005. It worked well enough that other Northern California clubs modelled their own expansion on ours, and Lamorinda helped establish the Northern California Youth Rugby Association in 2010. We still serve on its board and sub-committees.