Our Touch Team Celebrated its First Birthday (and More)

From park sessions to the prestigious Bembel Cup — the Berlin Irish touch squad reflects on a remarkable first 15 months.

Berlin Irish touch team at the Bembel Cup in September

It’s been an intense year for our touch team, which celebrated its first anniversary last June. Despite being around since a relatively short amount of time, the squad already managed to play a grand total of nine tournaments or friendly matches, including its first big outing: the Bembel Cup, which takes place in Frankfurt every September and includes teams from the whole central European region, many of have been around for more than 20 years and regularly feed players to the German, Swiss and French national teams. The invitation to participate in this prestigious tournament came after 15 months of constant training and networking that brought our team very far since its beginnings, which lay in the desire by some of the oldest members of the club -who for various reasons retired from full-contact rugby- to keep on playing and enjoying the unique Berlin Irish club culture.

But let me give you a short recap before I’ll tell you how Frankfurt went.

After the first makeshift sessions held in Jungfernheide, we started offering social trainings hosted in some of Berlin’s major parks (which helped to recruit many new players, some of which had little or no rugby experience), and we were able to play our first friendly in Potsdam after just 6 months of existence, on an extremely cold December afternoon.

Then, we “officially” entered the Berlin touch scene, which is an extremely lively and friendly place to be in: our first game in Potsdam was followed by other outings in nearby Velten (which recently started its own touch team as well), and last March we were also able to host our first St. Patrick’s Day touch competition alongside our youth teams. This particular event enabled us to face the Bruisers’ touch team, a very welcome occasion given the long-standing friendship existing between our clubs.

Another big milestone was our first trip outside Berlin: a visit to the Leipzig-based O.K. Rugby club, which due to unfortunate circumstances did not turn into a game (however, we stayed for the craic). A few months later, our peeps from Leipzig kindly returned the favour to us by coming to Berlin for a proper match filled with great moves and a lot of fun (and more craic).

But what about the Bembel Cup? Well, to deem it a success would be an understatement: our squad did not come last, managed to score against every opponent, brought home a solid win against a mixed Hannover / Heidelberg team, but above all had the honour of having Manu named as the tournament male MVP, a title that really says something considering the quality of the opposition. Furthermore, the whole competition really gave us more confidence and experience on the pitch (but also off it: yet more craic!).

In the meantime, more and more people are joining our training sessions -coached by our touch masters Jack, Manu, and Diego- via Meetup or just out of curiosity: in fact, half of our current members did not previously play for our other teams, and got into touch rugby just by playing in the Irish squad. Not only that, but two of our players (Marius and Anthony) became certified touch referees, and gave a very strong display at the recent German National Championships held in Berlin.

All of this is definitely a huge success for our club, as well as for the ever-growing Berlin touch scene, and shows how all you need to have fun and a great game is a bunch of friends and an oval ball. The rest comes naturally.

Here’s to our first year of successes and many more to follow!