When Edmond Rugby Coaches Greg McFadden and Garrick Cocker telephone friends and family, they dial across 7,800 miles of ocean, nineteen time zones, and six months on nature's calendar. For Assistant Coach Dante Lazzarotto, family is three time zones away, basking in the summer sun.

McFadden and Cocker hail from New Zealand. Lazzarotto is from Argentina. When it is winter here it is summer down under. But, thanks to the Edmond Rugby Club, Oklahoma has a touch of home for these Southern Hemisphere transplants.

For them, it was a missionary effort to create the Edmond Storm, which competes in Oklahoma's Green Country Rugby League with Norman, Mustang, and six Tulsa schools and against Wichita, Kansas, for the Great Plains Trophy. After last year's first game, McFadden told friends, "Now, I feel that Edmond is home."

Coaches Garrick Cocker, Dante Dante Lazzarotto, and Greg McFadden cut the ribbon to open the Edmond Rugby Fields, November 15, 2008.

A New Zealander, McFadden is the Storm's USA Rugby-certified backs coach. He came to the U.S. in the 1990s and played rugby for the old Oklahoma City Men's Club. His first local attachment was future wife Whitney Zeka of Canton. "On our first date, I thought, oh man, I love this country." And what did they do on that first date? "I showed her rugby videos."

New Zealand and rugby have been a part of the couple's lives ever since. Greg even proposed to Whitney while on a train over a New Zealand mountain pass. There was no way he could back out. Waiting for them with banners and cheers at the next station were his old rugby mates.

Forwards coach Cocker, also a New Zealander, came to the U.S. to attend Brigham Young University. A player for the powerful Auckland-Ponsonby club, Garrick joined Provo United and the Steelers. While at BYU, he met Deborah Allen, a Kiowa-American from Anadarko. Bound together across the Pacific by love and a strong Mormon faith, they have three girls and son Josh, who plays for Edmond . The couple operates Echelon Construction.

Joining these pioneers on game days is Argentine-born Dante Lazzarotto, an international businessman, who is a stickler for fitness. The players joke that Lazzarotto is Spanish for "two laps around the field and twenty push-ups." He and his Argentine wife Mariana, have an 18-month old daughter Mia.

The Edmond Rugby Club is a tax-exempt, non-profit Oklahoma corporation affiliated with USA Rugby. Club President Dr. Richard Bernard, Graduate Dean at the University of Central Oklahoma, learned his rugby twenty years ago when the U.S. State Department sent him to New Zealand's University of Canterbury as a Fulbright Lecturer.

"I began by cheering the red and black of Canterbury," he recalled, "and now I help manage the red and black Storm. Same uniforms. Different teams." That's literally true, for McFadden's father, a New Zealand rugby official, shipped Canterbury jerseys to Edmond. "Imagine if a high school football team could wear real Dallas Cowboy uniforms," said McFadden. "This is the rugby equivalent."

Caption: Brent Frew, Canterbury Rugby Union Coaching and Development Officer, receives an Edmond Rugby Club appreciation plaque from Les McFadden at the training camp of the Crusaders, who dominated Southern Hemisphere rugby and won their seventh international Super XIV title. Christchurch, New Zealand, May 27, 2008.

Rounding out the Storm's staff are Parents' Council Chair Rulissa Trout and Secretary Nancy Christensen. Parents' support is crucial since the club follows the New Zealand model of family and community involvement.

"We bring boys together," said Trout, "We bring families together just as the boys are reaching adulthood." To do that, the club has many family social events, including those around free post-game meals for the Storm and its opponent at Edmond's Flat Tire Burger.

This camaraderie has carried over to Oklahoma State University and the University of Central Oklahoma where several former Edmond players now play.

Edmond may not have New Zealand's mountains and wilderness areas, but it does have rugby, the world's second most popular team sport. "None of us had played before last year," admitted scrum-half Ramsey Bush, "but the coaches made it exciting. I was hooked in 20 minutes." Forward Tyler Trout could not agree more. "In this game, you knock a guy on his tail but then have dinner with him after the game. Rugby is one fun game."

The Storm's 2009 season starts in late January. Schedules will appear shortly.

Edmond Rugby Club gets a new field from the city, see more in our article

Edmond Rugby Club gets into Wikipedia. See more in our article

The club gets the inpirational movie "Forever Strong" to come to Oklahoma City. See more in our article

Rugby Players Storm into Action. See more in our article

Think rugby players only fly in a line-out? See our article

The Edmond Storm achieves their first victory against the Norman Colts See more in our article

Thanks to the efforts of the University of Central Oklahoma's design department, the Edmond Rugby Club now has a new website. We hope you enjoy the site and look forward to utilizing it to inform the community and our families of the Storm's events and accomplishments.