The Stony Brook men’s rugby team will be selling custom team wristbands on campus beginning in October to help offset the club’s rising costs.

The team was promoted to the top level of club rugby, Division-I, this past spring. It has also added another men’s side that will compete at the Division-III club level. Selling wristbands marks the first time the club, which is not governed by the NCAA or granted money by Stony Brook Athletics, will fund itself independently, an attempt to supplement the financial support of Undergraduate Student Government and alumni donations.

“It’s been a pretty tight squeeze as it is with just one team last year,” Tom Kirnbauer, the club’s treasurer, said.

With two teams instead of last year’s one, Kirnbauer said that not only will costs like transportation and equipment naturally go up, but also, the team will become increasingly competitive. As a result, it must spend more to register for as many tournaments as possible to continue gaining national recognition.

“We’re really trying to make a strong push in Division I so that we’ll hopefully make it to the national circuit,” Kirnbauer said. That means players must pay out-of-pocket more frequently for expenses like food and gas when traveling to playoff, all-star, and other tournaments.

And, with added players, there will be more stomachs and tanks to fill.

According to USG’s budget, men’s rugby was allocated $48,500 this year compared to just over $57,000 last year. Only about $600 in alumni donations went to the team’s endowment fund at the end of last year, head coach Danny Yarusso said.

Yet, even with the decrease in rugby’s allotment, other USG-funded sports clubs don’t see nearly the budget that rugby does. Men’s lacrosse receives $6,000, while women’s lacrosse receives $9,000. Soccer club is apportioned just $3,500. However, the vital expenses of rugby club—the transportation, food and equipment costs covered by the athletics department for the school’s NCAA-affiliated sports—aren’t completely paid for by the USG-granted budget.

The team’s financial state spurred John Gemma, a Stony Brook alumnus with a degree in economics and former men’s rugby player, to contact Kirnbauer and C.J. Olson, the club’s vice president, over the summer about starting a fundraiser.

“In order to continue to help the club grow, I felt that financial support is really essential and one of the weaknesses at this point,” Gemma said. “And, in order to make that a little better, we should fundraise.”

Olson researched the prudency of selling wristbands during the first two weeks of school after teammate Steve Cesareo suggested the idea. After putting together a pitch, he met with Gemma, who approved the proposal and fronted $500 to buy 1,000 bracelets from 24hourwristbands.com. The club’s executive board will give each team member 10 bracelets to sell soon after the shipment arrives around October 6.

“What we’ll try to do is use that for other fundraising ideas, which we’re still brainstorming about,” Olson said. “Depending on the success of the wristbands, we’ll make another order.”

The team expects to raise between $1,000 to $1,500 from the fundraiser—a small-scale range, Gemma said, “just to get things started in hopes that future fundraisers will be able to do much better than that.”

The team’s goal won’t be just to fundraise for profit. Even as a club, it also wants to build on its growing popularity.

“As a club, we feel we’re at the cusp now because now that we’re a Division-I team, that means we’re already a legitimate club,” Olson said. “We want to maintain that.”

He even takes it a step further.

“We don’t just want to maintain, we want to push that,” he said with emphasis. “We want to be more of presence in the community. We want to be more of a presence on campus.”