Our Club
Seacoast Men’s Rugby is part of the New England Rugby Football Union (NERFU), New England’s own Geographic Union for USA Rugby. NERFU includes rugby clubs all over New England and some parts of New York. Seacoast Rugby players represent all seacoast towns of New Hampshire and southern Maine. The men’s club currently competes in NERFU Men’s Division IV and play their home matches on Sanderson’s Field in North Hampton. The Seacoast Women’s+ Rugby Club is also part of NERFU in the Women’s+ Division III and play their home matches in Dover.
Our History
The Seacoast Rugby Club began in 1998. The men’s club has primarily competed in NERFU Men’s Division III and won Division III championships in 2003 and 2013. In 2014, Seacoast’s men’s club rebranded to “Freedom Rugby Football Club” and became a new business organization under that name. In the 2014 season, Freedom Rugby were poised to repeat the Seacoast championship season from the year before, but came up short losing in the championship final. Since then, the club found some success in winning the 2018 Men’s Pool C championship in the annual NERFU Cup spring tournament, but the fall season of 2018 would be the last Division III season for Freedom Rugby. Freedom was one of the teams NERFU chose to relegate to Division IV for the 2019 season.
Since 2019, five other former Division III clubs were dropped to Division IV making the D4 quality of competition the best that it ever had been. With this move, NERFU had joined the other USA Rugby geographic unions of the Atlantic (Empire Rugby Football Union, Eastern Pennsylvania Rugby Union, and Capital Rugby Union) in having a quality Men’s D4 competition enough for USA Rugby to include Men’s Division IV in the Atlantic Super Regional playoffs. The stage was set for Freedom Rugby to win a New England division championship, to go on to compete for the Atlantic Super Regional division championship, and to make a case for promotion back to Division III. Freedom was a top-tier team every season in this renewed Division IV with consistent playoff seasons each year, but came up just shy of a title each year. But there was no doubt that the breakthrough would finally come.
In the summer of 2023, the players voted to reclaim “Seacoast” for the club’s brand name as it was a much better logical fit for the local community that the club represented. Freedom Rugby rebranded back to “Seacoast Men’s Rugby” as an official club name with “Freedom Rugby Football Club” being maintained as the business entity name. Alongside the original club name, winning culture was restored in the 2023 season as Seacoast Men’s Rugby broke through and won the NERFU Men’s Division IV championship, ending a 10-year New England championship drought. Seacoast will represent NERFU in the USA Rugby Men’s Division IV Atlantic Super Regional tournament in the spring of 2024 looking to be crowned as the best Men’s Division IV club in the nation.
Our Mission
Freedom Rugby Football Club is a 501c3 non-profit in the state of New Hampshire. Seacoast Men’s Rugby is inclusive and open to all who wish to try their hand at local, competitive rugby with no prior playing experience required. The players are all in their 20s or older with various career paths and various prior athletic experiences. We aim to grow the sport of rugby by putting out a competitive, entertaining product on the pitch while being a strong presence in our seacoast community. Practices are two days per week in the spring, summer, and fall. Exhibition matches and tournaments take place in the spring while the competitive season starts in the fall. Are you interested in learning more or joining? Come and see what our culture is all about. Visit and message our Facebook or Instagram pages or contact us via our contact form. For monthly email updates, subscribe to our newsletter.