During her senior year, Kloey Bacchus was the captain of the ICEF girls rugby team. She learned being a captain means being a sounding board for her teammates. Previous captains provided that for her.
“I needed somebody to talk to and the captains that were there last year helped me,” Bacchus said. “Just knowing that I am a legacy of that and I helped my teammates just really makes me happy.”
Providing help to her teammates made her realize how much she grown emotionally and mentally. Along with playing rugby, Bacchus was a member of ASB. She also did an internship with the Angel City Football Club and was a member of the Alliance Leadership Initiative.
Soon after joining the rugby team as a junior, she traveled to Fiji with the team.
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“We stayed in the homes of the villagers,” Bacchus said. “It was very nice because we had no Wi-Fi, we didn’t even have time to be on our phones and that’s what I wanted to get out of that trip.”
During her senior year, ICEF rugby competed in the Urban Rugby Championship. She mention how her opponents felt evenly matched. A match against a team from New York felt like “a war.”
“That was our last game that we had and that game got rough,” Bacchus said. “They definitely came with a tough game and they had that determination and they showed up and showed out and so did we.”
Growing up, Bacchus learned MMA and gymnastics. The physicality of both sports helped her when competing in rugby.
“For MMA, you really have to get low when you’re going in to get somebody down and that’s the same thing for rugby,” she said. “On the field, I do a lot of tackling because I just love doing it. It’s fun; it’s like a stress reliever.”
For Bacchus being a student athlete means showing a different side of herself while displaying skills that go far beyond academics.
“A lot of people don’t really see that side of me because I feel like I’m very nice,” Bacchus said. “I’m not just a smart person, I’m also an athlete who does stuff outside of school, who supports their school, who has that spirit who is committed to something for the long run.”
