Courage. Resourcefulness. Discipline. Endurance. Selflessness. All traits that could be used to describe either an elite soldier or a top rugby player. Perhaps then it is no coincidence that the 2003 NCAA Men's Rugby national champions hail from the United States Air Force Academy.

Heading up this squad of unique student-athletes for the last three years has been Austin High School graduate Rob Holder, class of 1985.

It might seem unusual to find a Minnesotan at the helm of any rugby program, let alone one as successful as Air Force's, given that California and the East Coast have been the traditional hotbeds of the game in the United States. Holder never even played rugby until after college.

At AHS, Holder was a captain and a starter at middle linebacker and fullback on Austin's last two Big Nine Conference championship football teams in 1983 and 1984. He was also an accomplished wrestler, placing all four years at sections and earning All-Conference honors twice. The gridiron was his first love -- he was even recruited to play football at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point -- but he ended up wrestling there instead, lettering his final two years.

"It was his leadership in high school that helped him get into West Point," said his former wrestling coach Chuck Prunty, who wasn't surprised to hear about Holder's coaching success. "He was quite a pinner too," he added.

Upon graduating, Holder was stationed in Germany as an artillery lieutenant. While there, he happened upon his future career almost by accident.

"I was looking for something like rugby to pass the time," Holder said, "so I ended up trying it and I got hooked, I absolutely loved the sport."

After a stint serving in the first Gulf War, Holder moved back to Minnesota for a time with his wife Anne, also a West Point graduate. She soon grew tired of the harsh winters, so they moved south to Chicago.

This turned out to be quite fortuitous for his rugby career, as he began to play for the Chicago Lions club team. He had immediate success, earning rookie of the year honors for them in 1994 and serving as captain in 1995.

His wife however wanted more mountains than the Windy City had to offer, so they packed up again and moved out to Colorado, a compromise between Minnesota and her home state of Utah.

Holder then latched on with the Denver Barbarians club, where he won a national title as a player. He also had a brief stint on the U.S. National Team in 1999.

His father Bill, a retired sixth-grade teacher at Ellis Middle School, had done some coaching, but Holder's main motivation to try the profession had a lot in common with his introduction to the sport.

"It was a roundabout thing," he said. "I had had some success in leadership roles in the Army and in the business world, so I realized that maybe I could turn my hobby into my profession and be able to do both."

Holder served as a volunteer assistant coach at Air Force during the 1998-99 season before taking a year off. When he returned in 2000 as the head coach, he would be the first full-time head coach in the school's distinguished rugby history.

While Air Force had won the national title in 1990, the 10 years that followed had seen Cal (University of California at Berkeley) dominate the sport, reeling off the first 10 of what would be 12 straight NCAA championships.

The squad that Holder inherited that first season was far cry from that title team. They were coming off a winless 1999-2000 campaign in which they were the fifth-best squad in Colorado.

"The biggest challenge was letting people know that we were serious," Holder said, " because for a long time, rugby was just a small group who didn't take it very seriously, which is fine, but we had higher goals for the sport here."

In Holder's first year as head coach, Air Force reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, where Cal shellacked them by more than 60 points.

"We just looked at each other and said, 'That was embarrassing, we're not going to let that happen again.'"

The following year, word began to spread around the Academy about the new athletic juggernaut on campus.

"That was key for us, to get people excited about joining up and playing rugby, since we knew we had the athletes already in school here," Holder said.

He and his coaching staff also reintroduced intramural rugby to the Academy. His top players would serve as referees for those games, thus allowing them identify players who could contribute at the varsity level.

This sort of internal recruiting is necessary for a program like Air Force's, which only had about two or three players this past year with significant rugby experience prior to college. This stands in sharp contrast to the traditional powerhouses from Cal, Stanford, and the Ivy League, who tend to stock their teams with high school players either from Northern California or from other countries.

In order to unseat the hierarchy of college rugby, Holder used a philosophy he was taught on the Austin football field by former AHS head coach Don Fox and defensive coordinator Dick Lees.

"I really learned the importance of delegating responsibility to the players on the field from Coach Lees," Holder said. "He used to let me call a lot of our defensive plays, which not many teams were doing back then.

"We teach the kids the fundamentals, but my coaches and I take pride in being able to take a step back and let them go, because we think it helps them make key decisions in the heat of the battle."

This leeway has paid off for Air Force, allowing them to employ a counterattacking style predicated on turning defense into quick offensive strikes.

Everything came together at this year's NCAA Championships in Palo Alto, Calif. Their semifinal opponent would be the same Cal team that had beaten them so badly just two years before. This was not the same Air Force team though, as they dispatched the Golden Bears 46-28.

That set up the championship game against Harvard. The two teams traded the lead over the last 10 minutes before a late penalty kick secured a 45-37 win to clinch the national title for Air Force.

Coming on the heels of this success was last Monday's announcement that Holder will be the head coach of this year's All-America team, made up of collegiate all-stars, for their tour of New Zealand in August.

He's even begun an AHS pipeline, as Dan Gilbertson, Class of '02, was a freshman on this past year's team.

Holder lives in Golden, Colo., with his wife and their children Will, Katie, and Emma -- ages 12, 9, and 6. His father and his mother Helen, a first-grade teacher at Neveln Elementary, still reside in Austin.

E-mail Alex Blumer at :mailto:sports@austindailyherald.com.