After a strong 2025–26 campaign, the young cowboys’ squad is looking to build for the future
Photo by Charlie Coles
LARAMIE, Wy. — In 2025, the Cowboys club rugby team had their best season in around a decade, achieving a top 25 ranking in D1 college rugby and beating opponents such as Montana State, CU Boulder, and Utah Valley University.
This year, after graduating over half a dozen vital seniors, including All-American Cole Williams, the Cowboy ruggers had an excellent recruiting class.
Still, sometimes young talent needs time to develop and grow, as shown by the start of this season.
The team has shown promise starting off the 2026 fall campaign, but no results have come yet.
After facing a tough beginning schedule against CU Boulder and University of Utah, the Cowboys find themselves at 0–2.
With over a third of the starting 15 players being freshman though, the program has a lot of hope going forward.
Junior captain Miles Porwoll said the team has a lot of potential, it just needs to work out some kinks and small issues with the younger members to start growing as a unit and playing high-quality rugby.
Here at UW, not much of the student population has experience with playing rugby, especially since it is not offered as a high school sport in the state.
This means that often times, with many of the recruited members being from Wyoming, a good portion of the team is learning the sport for the first time — a huge contributing factor to the learning curve and adjustment period.
However, sometimes these “transfer athletes” turn out to be star players for the team, including Porwoll, who played football and ran track in Cheyenne in high school.
Rugby is also one of the few sports where the fall and spring seasons are dramatically different games.
In the fall, rugby is an 80-minute war between two teams of 15, often brutal on the body and extremely physically demanding.
In the spring, the game shifts to what is called “sevens,” where teams play on the same sized field, but have only seven players playing for seven-minute halves at a much faster pace.
The Cowboys are typically excellent at sevens.
With many star athletes from around the state coming to Laramie to play rugby, their athleticism shines through when it’s time for the spring season.
The Cowboys have qualified for the national tournament for the last two years, even achieving a sixth-place finish this year at the D1AA national finals in Iowa City.
But currently, the focus is to get the team in a place where they can finish strong in the current fifteens.
The Cowboys’ next challenge is this weekend at Fraternity Mall, where they are hosting Utah State on Saturday.
The rest of the season sees them in a matchup with CSU on Halloween, traveling to Air Force the week after, and then competing in a final showdown against Wayne State on Nov. 14th.
