Eyes on AVEVA Stadium

Thanks to our friends at The Rugby Network and Pat Clifton for visiting AVEVA Stadium. Check out the feature below and read more at the link.

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“This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen,” is the movie quote I couldn’t get out of my head Saturday.

Friday, making the winding 12-hour drive through middle America, including a stretch along old Route 66 in Oklahoma, now bordered less with tourist traps and burger spots and more with medical marijuana dispensaries and dollar stores, my mind mostly rested on which players to interview, which storylines to pursue and what shots needed to be set up for the next episode of Inside the Ruck.

As we wound around Tulsa, my head briefly went to how many pros that one-club town has birthed; Atlanta’s Chance Wenglewski and Austin White, the now-retired Julian Montes, former Glendale and San Diego flanker and current 7s Eagle Malon Al-Jiboori, and future MLR signee and capped 15s Eagle Lorenzo Thomas.

I didn’t anticipate the emotions my final destination, AVEVA Stadium for the Houston SaberCats versus the New England Free Jacks, would conjure. After all, I wasn’t walking into the mecca of college football to watch my middle-aged, walk-on son make his lone appearance for the team I’d worshipped my entire life, fulfilling a promise he’d made to me and his late best friend who blew up in a factory accident, inspiring him to chase his dreams.

That was the narrative for Ned Beatty’s character in Rudy, as the field at Notre Dame Stadium came into his view. I was just going to see an early-season, interconference MLR game, I figured.

How naive.

Glendale’s Infinity Park, opened in 2007, is credited as America’s first rugby-specific stadium, and rightfully so. But it’s also a community center, fire station, city hall, open-air movie theater and seemingly 15 other things for the city of Glendale. It existed long before professional rugby, and it operates uninterrupted after Glendale’s exit from MLR. If rugby were outlawed in the state of Colorado tomorrow, Infinity Park would still serve a purpose.

AVEVA, on the other hand, was built for the sole, expressed mission of housing a professional rugby team and building a community around it. In that sense, it’s the first of its kind.

The first glimpse I got of the stadium was from about a mile away — the third floor of an apartment building where some of the SaberCats and a smattering of the young guys in their academy, Rugby HTX, are being housed.

As I drove up the next day, high school teams prepared to take one of the two outer fields, while Eagle great, SaberCat assistant and HTX head coach Paul Emerick was pulling flags and pads out of storage and directing his charges to set them up. Team president JT Onyett and the facilities manager, six hours before the SaberCats’ kickoff, looked on as a marathon curtain raiser of community rugby commenced.