The start of the 2008 season has had the Illinois men’s rugby players sharing bloody lips and the occasional broken bones with unfamiliar opponents.

Following an undefeated 2007 campaign as a Division II team, the Fighting Illini became the only rugby team in the country to move up to the Division I level this offseason.

The move was mostly rooted in paperwork, but it culminated when team president Bartek Czernikiewicz pleaded the team’s case in front of the Midwest Rugby Football Union’s board meeting last summer in Chicago. The board allowed Illinois to regain Division I status for the first time since the mid-’90s, when it was dropped from the league following several struggling seasons.

Having primarily faced the state schools of Western Illinois, Southern Illinois and Eastern Illinois on the Division II level, the team now finds itself at the center of Big Ten competition.

Immediately, the difference was evident.

“You should have seen the pre-game warmups of our first game,” starting forward Bill Roche said of the annual Big Ten Tournament.

Preparing to face Ohio State in the first match, Roche and his teammates watched the Buckeyes show up in matching warmups and come out of their university-sponsored vans.

“Some of us didn’t even have matching uniforms,” Roche said of the Illini, who drove their own cars to the tournament in Elkhart, Ind.

Even with such disparity, the Illini defeated the Buckeyes 14-10, finishing the tournament in fourth place with a 19-10 semifinal loss to Notre Dame, the only team participating that was not from a Big Ten school.

After defeating Minnesota 37-28 in their first regular season match, the Illini lost their next match 25-15 to Northern Iowa. On Saturday, the Illini defeated Iowa State at home, 36-20, to move to 2-1 on the season.

“We’re just trying to keep a level head and get used to the transition,” Czernikiewicz said.

Even still, the team has already taken steps to become equivalent to their other Division I opponents. While Ohio State employs a full coaching staff and a training staff provided by the university, the Illini recently just brought on a first-year volunteer coach, and has hired a private training service to attend games.

Other schools have a recruiting process and scholarships available for players, while the Illinois team still remains a Registered Student Organization. Czernikiewicz said recruiting and scholarships would be nice, but he would rather focus on getting the funds for amenities comparable to the team’s competition.

First on the wish list is a full coaching staff.

“That’ll be the first step in becoming a better program. We need better instruction,” Czernikiewicz said.

Czernikiewicz and the rest of the team is desperate for more funding, and they know only success on the field can bring that.

“Once we start getting attention for holding our own against the best teams, more people (in the administration) will notice,” Czernikiewicz said,

With volunteer head coach Paul Duquaine living nearly two hours away in Flora, Ill., the bulk of the responsibilities have fallen in the hands of student leadership.

“We have always been a student-run organization, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve come to the high point where we’re at,” Roche said. “We can stress what we want to stress, like the social aspect of our team.”

The program has endured some incidents off the field in the last few years, including dismissal from last year’s Division II playoffs because of what Roche would only describe as “a few bad, naked apples.”

Looking to fix up its image to ensure more funding from the University, the student leadership has tackled this issue head on, trying to maintain the club’s reputation.

Strict policies regarding compromising situations have been implemented, especially surrounding games and road trips. If players ever want to go out on the town, they are forbidden to wear clothing connecting them to Illini rugby.

“If we ever see our players wearing Illini rugby gear out when they shouldn’t be, we’ll send them home,” Czernikiewicz said.

Roche explained the social aspect of the team goes beyond the stereotypical rowdy behavior.

“We’re like a family more than any other sport here on campus, on and off the field,” Roche said.

A key component of off-field activities for the program has been community service. According to Czernikiewicz, the team may be “barely able to move on Sundays after our Saturday games,” but it still organizes some sort of volunteer effort on the Sunday mornings following Saturday matches.

Already this fall, the team has helped move a fallen tree from an elderly couple’s front yard and raked leaves in many yards.

Senior forward Jason Yakubovich remembers three years ago when Hurricane Katrina hit the southern coast, and the team drove down to help with the clean-up. Yakubovich and his teammates spent weeks clearing out an elementary school in New Orleans.

“When we heard about it, we packed a few cars and headed down to help,” Yakubovich said. “It was a great experience.” The team has various other events planned to stress the social side of the program, including a team-bonding trip to Oklahoma and Alabama over Thanksgiving break, and has deemed Thursday nights to be “Family Night.”

“We rugby players need this bond to help each other as a team,” Roche said. “We all need to have a few screws loose in the head to play rugby.”