UPCOMING FIXTURES

• Tue, July 28 - Carolina Burreson: Honeybee Discovery Center

• Tue, Aug 4 - Virginia Guleff: Butte College President - Update

• Sept 11 & 12 - Almanor Weekend (40 slots; contact Bill 

• Subscribe to the Chico Rotary calendar

 → Click here for the Master List of Upcoming Events ←
 

THE STARTING LINEUP

• Team in Charge: Australia Wallabies!
   
• Reporter: Zoom!
   
• Microphones: Brandon Keith & Will Wilbur
   
• Thought of the Day: Marci Ponder
   
• Match of the Week: A Women's Sevens highlight reel starring the week's hosts (Wallabies)
   

TEAM REPORT

Wallabies co-captain Kevin Moretti delivered July's report: 

The team holds its first meeting next Tuesday, has already banked weekend service at the Fourth of July parade and Slice of Chico, is collecting for the CASA volunteer program, and donates to the Chico Community Food Locker in non-blue bag months. A first joint social with Chile Los Cóndores — their July head-to-head opponents — is in the works, and the annual calendar is filling with perennial favorites like Pasta on the Plaza and Valentine's for Sycamore Glen. 

President Beau added a quick history side-note: the Wallabies played their first match in 1899 against a British Isles team, own the record rout — 142–0 in 2003 — and produced the legendary captain John Eales, nicknamed "Nobody." Because nobody's perfect.

VISITING SIDES

• Rex Moseley, Oroville Rotary
• Ron Jones, Rotary Paradise Rotary
• Dean Fender, freshly resigned from Paradise Rotary

IN THE GRANDSTAND 

• Kim Schafer, guest (daughter) of Walt Schafer
• Audrey Tennis, guest of Les Heringer
• David & Betty Nopel, guests of Michele Shover
   

FROM THE SIDELINE

President Beau opened with a promise not to keep anyone on their feet for two and a half hours this time, and reported that the morning's board meeting went fine — a light agenda, but one good discussion the board will bring to the full club later.

Valerie Reddemann, on behalf of the DCBA, thanked the club for showing up in force — several downtown retailers called it the best Slice of Chico they can remember, and against all odds the watermelon supply held to the finish. 

The DCBA needs hands year-round, so any team hunting for a project can get hooked up through Val. 

Bill Chance has stepped up the fall Lake Almanor weekend: September 11–13, $25 a head, capped at 40 people, with a sign-up form going out — reach Bill, his wife Kathy, or Trish Dunlap. 

Beau will miss it with the most on-brand excuse available: he'll be in Baltimore watching the Springboks play the All Blacks.

David Kim announced the Salvation Army's back-to-school event: new shoes and a voucher for kids in need. He brought adoption tags with him — find him to claim a child or two. 

President Beau's ruling: a monetary donation there earns your team a point.

Pulled up for an impromptu update, Phil Aviles reported the competition needs no jump start — socials, team meetings, and service-project talk everywhere he looks. 

Captains will get the full season schedule so every side knows who it plays in the months ahead.

A member's question earned the club a full clinic from President Beau: 

• union vs. league
• fifteens (40-minute halves) vs. the Olympic-fueled sevens (seven-minute halves)
• scoring's drift from 4-and-3 to today's 5-point try and 2-point conversion
• why a "try" is called that — your conversion is kicked from a line perpendicular to wherever you touch down. 

He covered the no-pads culture that teaches cheek-to-cheek form tackling, rain-soaked cotton jerseys that "weighed more than you did," the old rule that only a referee could declare you unfit enough to leave the field, and the day his club's three squads beat one opponent 330–0.

Attendance make-up rules:

RUGBY KIT BAG

Ticket #4337866 sent Cain Medina to the front for a pin from the Rotary International Convention in Taipei, straight out of President Beau's suitcase. 

His own Rotary pin? Not on the lapel — so the club's $40 charity kicker went unclaimed. 

Remember: Wear Team Rugby or Rotary gear to be eligible for the weekly prize from the Rugby Kit Bag.

And wear a Rotary pin: a local nonprofit is counting on you!

MATCH OF THE DAY

Michele Shover introduced David Nopel — Chico-born, a lifelong explorer of the trails and canyons east of town, and the man who once took her two well-traveled great-nephews gold mining ("they even came back with little sacks of gold"). 

Nopel traced the Humboldt Road from its 1864 stock certificate — John Bidwell's name at the top — as a toll wagon road meant to run a hundred miles to Susanville and make Chico the supply hub for Nevada's Humboldt mines, beginning at "The Junction" at the south end of downtown, where the freight wagons' turning ground survives as the Arco lot. 

He walked the club up the road station by station: the 14 Mile House, where Grandma Lucas ranked as the best cook on the entire route; Forest Ranch, born as a hotel and two barns; Butte Meadows, which burned through five hotels; Jonesville, whose cabin owners rescued the last surviving way station around 2010; and Big Meadows, the resort wonderland drowned beneath Lake Almanor around 1910. The transcontinental railroad — started the same year as the road — killed the long-haul freight dream by 1867, but the Humboldt Road got a second life feeding the Sierra Lumber Company's mills and the flume that floated rough-cut boards down to Chico, where company doctor Newton Enloe opened his first hospital at the West Branch mill camp. 

Nopel carried the story to the present — the 1965–71 blasting that straightened the old route into modern Highway 32 (erasing Robber's Roost, where bandits dropped onto stagecoach roofs), the wagon ruts still worn into the lava cap east of town, and the city's 1994 purchase of 1,600 acres that folded the famous County Seat Grade photo spot into Bidwell Park — "one of the best things to happen in Chico in my lifetime." He closed with Chico State professor Byron Wolfe's then-and-now re-photography, stitched from the very camera spots Nopel personally guided him to. 

The Team Song

Rugby has no walk-off single — what it has is arguably better: after the final whistle, the winning side sings its team song in the sheds. 

This week's belonged to the whole club — the viral, AI-built Rotary Rap that Beau wrestled out of the projector, a Hamilton-style origin story for Paul Harris that runs from a Chicago office in 1905 through the Four-Way Test to the fight against polio, cooked up by a couple of guys in the Midwest messing around with AI. 

Just click the picture below for last week's Team Song on YouTube!

Photographer: Fritz Schulenburg