But basketball wasn’t Heavirland’s only game. She and her twin brother Ryan ’14 and their older brother Taylor played multiple sports growing up. Everything was a competition. At bedtime, their father would take turns throwing a football to the three kids as they ran routes across the living room. A dropped pass banished you to bed. Nicole stayed up late more often than not.
And while she excelled in every sport, she was particularly drawn to tackle football and rugby. She played running back for the pee-wee football team and played club rugby through 10th grade. “There’s not a lot of girls out there willing to go tackle someone in the snow in Montana,” she laughs. “I fell in love with the physicality of it.”
Exeter doesn’t field a rugby team, but that didn’t stop Heavirland from continuing to play during her time at the Academy. In the summer before her senior year, she was invited to join a women’s junior national program that competed internationally.
Then came West Point. Heavirland entered the U.S. Military Academy in 2014, drawn to the high academic standards and leadership opportunities and the chance to play Division I college basketball. She played both basketball and rugby for the Black Knights as a plebe, but recurring invitations to travel and train with the U.S. Olympic rugby program clashed with the strict regulations of cadet life at West Point. Eventually, rugby won out. She left school after three semesters to join the full-time residence program in Chula Vista, California, to start 2016.
“It was hard to leave that type of academic institution,” she says, “because I knew that was going to help me in the future.”
Eight months later and just two years beyond Exeter, Heavirland was an Olympian. She represented the United States as women’s rugby made its Olympic debut in Rio de Janeiro. It was a bittersweet experience for her. She was proud to be part of the team, but she was an alternate. She never got onto the field as the U.S. finished in fifth place. Sitting and watching are not her strengths.
“A tug of war is a good way to put it,” she says. “It was super hard at the time, but it only made me better. I kept my nose down and just kept grinding.”
Heavirland says, “I only know hard work,” and she connects that to her time as a student at Exeter. “In order for me to get a B-plus or an A, I had to work hard. In order for me to succeed, I have to do it over and over again and put in the work.”
That determination turned her into a mainstay of the rugby program, even as her career has seesawed throughout the five years since Rio. Up as she was named captain of the women’s sevens. Down when new coaches came in and stripped her of that captaincy. Up as she and the team roared to five medals in six tournaments in 2019 on the way to Olympic qualification. Down as the coronavirus pandemic forced the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games to be postponed for a full calendar year.
Heavirland took that last disappoint hard. She was fit, physically and mentally, neither of which was a given if she had to wait another year. Not even her spot on the team was guaranteed. She left the training center to reset with family at home in Montana, an unplanned benefit of the Games’ postponement.
She rejoined the team in early 2021 in preparation for the rescheduled Tokyo Games, sparking the Americans to success in tournaments in Madrid and Dubai this spring. The U.S. is a top-four seed and a real contender for a medal. The team’s starting scrum-half — rugby’s version of point guard — Heavirland will have the ball in her hands frequently as the Olympic tournament unfolds starting July 28.
Who knows? That Sports Illustrated cover might happen yet.
Late bloomer
Molly Reckford had given up on rowing — or rather, rowing seemed to have given up on her by the time she graduated from Dartmouth College in 2015.
Reckford enjoyed a solid Exeter rowing career mostly in Big Red’s second boat — “not anything remarkable, no awards, no accolades,” she says. She was tall but slight for a college rower, and her inquiries to collegiate programs were mostly met with “Thank you for your interest” replies. She eventually walked on at Dartmouth and rowed competitively for the Big Green, but no matter how hard she worked and how much committed herself to the sport, her passion went unrewarded. By the time she left Hanover for an investment job in New York City, her rowing career appeared to be over.