Birkenhead School’s German & French teacher, Mike Turner, is off to Amsterdam this week with his rugby club, Liverpool Tritons, as part of the first Merseyside team to be represented at the Bingham Cup, playing against teams from London, Paris and Melbourne in the group stages.
The Bingham Cup is a biennial rugby competition involving gay and inclusive rugby clubs from all across the globe. It is named after Mark Bingham, a rugby player who played for the San Francisco Fog rugby team and who helped found New York's Gotham Knights club. He was a passenger on Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco on September 11th, 2001 and is widely believed to have been among the group who tried to take control of the aircraft from the hijackers, which then crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
The following year, his club hosted the first tournament in his name, with eight gay or inclusive rugby clubs taking part. This year, a total of seventy teams will be competing across three tiers of competition. As one of the newest teams taking part, Mike's team, Liverpool Tritons, knows the competition will be tough even in the third tier, but for a club less than two years old to field a team at the event is an achievement in itself and lots of work and fundraising has been going on this year to allow this to happen.
Some of the players, much like Mike, had never played rugby before joining the Tritons, but as he explains, "that's what is so great about an inclusive team. Many people, whatever their sexuality, imagine that rugby isn't for them, as they don't fit a particular stereotype of how they imagine rugby players to be. As a schoolboy, my experience of team sports was not great. I wasn't naturally good at, nor was I especially interested in, football, the main sport at my first secondary school, and the school I moved to in Year 8 did not have any competitive sports teams. I genuinely never saw myself as a sportsman and it's only now that I have become one through the Tritons that I appreciate how fortunate pupils are at Birkenhead School to have such fantastic sporting opportunities available to them."
"Rugby is in many ways the perfect sport for an inclusive club: players come in a range of shapes and sizes, players learn respect as part of the ethos of the game, and so we find other local clubs are accepting of us and appreciate what we are trying to achieve. Not many mainstream clubs provide the same opportunity to get into the sport as an adult with no experience."
"I've really enjoyed having a new, diverse circle of friends and I feel like we're doing something positive for the image of gay men in sport at the same time. If young people today see what we are doing, and as a result understand that anyone can be a sportsman if they want to be, then we will have achieved something really worthwhile. I may never play for England, but being part of a team is much more than the success you have on the pitch. The camaraderie, the support, the leadership skills you can learn and the friendships you make are invaluable."
We wish the Tritons the very best of luck!