About us
A group of people who wanted to play rugby on a Thursday and never got round to founding a club.
St. Gallen Touch Rugby started in 2009, when a woman from St. Gallen came back to Switzerland and could not find anywhere to play the sport she had picked up abroad. Rather than wait for someone else to organise it, she put out a call, found enough people to make up two sides, and started playing on the Kreuzbleiche. We have been there on Thursday evenings ever since.
Since then the group has never really had a fixed shape. Some people have played every week for years, others come for a season while they are in town for work or study. On any given Thursday you will find people from St. Gallen alongside people who arrived from somewhere else six weeks ago, which is part of why the whole thing runs in English.
Mixed teams, all ages
Teams are mixed every week: women and men on the same side, twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings in the same game. Because there is no contact, that mix works, and nobody has to be the strongest person on the pitch to be useful.
Skill levels are just as mixed. Some people have played rugby seriously, most have not. The people who have played are usually the ones explaining the rules, not the ones complaining about them.
Not a club, on purpose
We are not registered, we do not charge anything, we do not have a committee, a treasurer or an AGM. Nobody has to renew anything in January. It keeps the barrier to turning up as low as it can go, and it means the only thing holding the group together is that people want to be there.
The trade-off is that we depend on people showing up. We need at least ten to make a game, so there is a poll in the WhatsApp group each week, and we ask that you come along with some regularity rather than once a year. That is the whole membership policy.
Because we are a group of private individuals and not an official club, participation is at your own risk and under your own insurance. We accept no liability for injuries, damage or theft.
The third half
The rugby stops around 20:00 and the evening usually does not. Whoever is up for it stays on the grass with a beer, or carries on at the Billard Pub S’billis, which is as close to a clubhouse as we get. When there is rugby worth watching on television, we go to Brüw.
If you would rather play the full-contact version as well, St. Gallen has the Bishops for men and the Cindies for women at bishops.ch. Several of our regulars do both.
In the press
The St. Galler Tagblatt has written about the group and its Thursday games on the Kreuzbleiche, including a piece on how the sessions work and a photo gallery from the pitch.
What else is there to do on a Thursday evening in St. Gallen?
One of the regulars
Come along on a Thursday
Fill in the form, we add you to the WhatsApp group, and you take it from there.