The 14-year-old girl is a blue blur, streaking down the field with the white oval ball cradled against her body. Several opposing players - most of them boys - gamely give chase, but they might as well sit down. She can't be caught.
Sure enough, Chanel Paye glides across the goal line, plops the ball on the ground and chalks up five more points for the Howard County Hurricanes. Once again, No. 5 shows why she's one of the fastest young rugby players in the area.
"You go, girl!" shouts her beaming grandmother, Catherine Paye, from a parked station wagon. "She's good, ain't she?"
Paye certainly is good, as are most of the nearly 300 youths ages 6 through 14 who took part in scrums and mauls and generally had a grand time at yesterday's region-wide rugby tournament in Severna Park.
The popular image of rugby may be of burly men slamming each other into submission or of partying college guys looking to bang heads between slurps of beer on the sidelines.
Elements of that may be true, but so is this: the Baltimore-Washington region has become a hotbed of youth rugby since an organized program began five years ago. While the numbers are still small here and interest appears to be low elsewhere in the United States, organizers think the sport one day may captivate this country's young people the way soccer has in recent years.
That would mean still more competition for baseball, a sport once synonymous with lazy summer days but increasingly derided by kids as a boring pastime with too little action.
"Kids think rugby is cool," said Patrick Walsh, who helped start youth rugby in the Lutherville-Timonium area in 1995 and is commissioner of the Potomac Rugby Union Youth League.
Walsh has the numbers to prove it. Last year the league consisted of six rugby clubs from Baltimore to Northern Virginia. This year, it has 10 clubs. Walsh expects the total to rise next year to at least 14.
Boys and girls play side by side (about 50 players in the league are girls), making youth rugby one of the few sports where girls and boys share the field. Players and coaches say girls such as Paye are every bit the boys' equal - perhaps offering the children an unspoken lesson on par with the value of teamwork.
The kids' version is different in some respects from traditional rugby. Matches are shorter: 40 minutes instead of 80. Teams have seven players to a side, not 15. And while the adult variety includes tackling - but no helmets or padding for protection - the kids use two-hand touch to force a pass.
