Training Every Tuesday & Thursday at 6:30pm at the Brockton Oval (Men's & Women's team)
In one paragraph
The Rowers have played rugby at Brockton Oval, in Stanley Park, since 1908. The clubhouse on Coal Harbour is shared with the wider Vancouver Rowing Club, founded in 1886 and the oldest amateur athletic club in the city. The rugby section has been part of that building, that ground, and that club for the entire time.
The founding
The Vancouver Rowing Club was founded in 1886 as a rowing and sailing club on the inner harbour. It is the oldest amateur athletic club in Vancouver. By the early 1900s, members wanted a winter sport for the months they couldn't row, and rugby fit. The rugby section formed in 1908, moved into Brockton Oval the same year, and it has been there ever since.
The same building still houses both clubs today. Rowers and rugby players walking past each other in the corridor at the foot of Stanley Park is a daily fact of the place.
The ground
Brockton Oval sits on the eastern side of Stanley Park, with the seawall and the harbour on one side and trees on the other. It has been the senior home ground of VRC Rugby for the entire run of the rugby section. The grandstand on the rugby side and the stone wall along the seawall edge are both well over a hundred years old.
No other senior rugby club in Vancouver plays its home matches inside a city park. Generations of players have walked off the pitch with the Stanley Park seawall in their cooldown.
The modern era
VRC Rugby today fields senior men's sides across BC Rugby Division 1 and Division 3, a senior women's side competing in BC Rugby, and a Mini and Youth program at Brockton Oval running from age 4 through U16. Players have come up through the youth pipeline, taken the senior shirt, captained Rugby Canada, and played in Major League Rugby. Others used the club as a way into Vancouver from another country and stayed for the rest of their adult life.
The work each season is the same as it was a hundred years ago, in the same building, on the same pitch.
Have a piece of the story?
If you're a former Rower, family of a former Rower, or just have a programme or photograph from an old season, the club would love to see it. We're slowly building a proper archive of the rugby section's history.
Get in touch with the club