BERKELEY - He's become known at the University of California as the double major in dreadlocks, a subject of the “I Need Possible” online video series, a contributor to the Golden Bears' second straight College Rugby Championship 7s title in June and a recipient this past summer of USA Rugby All-America honors for the second straight year at Cal.
Alec Gletzer seemed to appear out of thin air to start piling on those accomplishments in Berkeley during the spring of 2013. After he helped the Bears storm back to beat Saint Mary's in April of that season, a coach from New York commented about Gletzer's performance on Facebook, “Word on the street is that the #7 was Superman.”
To the unprepared fan, perhaps Gletzer did come out of nowhere wearing the No. 7 jersey as a flanker for Jack Clark's Rugby Bears. But before he could become many fans' favorite, the 6-1, 220-pound Gletzer had to travel a road that ran a bit longer than the 55 miles from his hometown to enter the University as a transfer student.
After graduating Los Gatos High School with a solid varsity football résumé as a linebacker for the Cats and a less impressive record in the classroom, Gletzer enrolled at Santa Barbara City College with “the dream” to come to Cal. To achieve that dream he needed a plan, which he found and successfully patterned according to the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum. An agreement between the UC system and California community colleges on courses that can be effectively carried from one institution to the other in a student's transfer, IGETC became Gletzer's pathway into the University.
Gletzer had hung up his football helmet for the final time after high school graduation and dedicated his competitive athletic future to the rugby pitch. He was recognized for that hard work as well, earning U-20 U.S. National Team selections in 2011 and his first USA Rugby All-America recognition in 2012 at Santa Barbara City.
Academically, Gletzer followed a worksheet that ensured he took classes akin to those that freshmen and sophomores were taking at Cal, and bit by bit over two school years and two summers, put together the building blocks he needed.
“It's one thing to have a dream,” said Clark, his future head coach. “It's another thing to execute it. Alec did that.”
During his first semester in Berkeley, “I was terribly scared of school,” Gletzer said. “I was in the library every single day. I braced myself knowing I had made it into the No. 1 public university in the world. I knew once I got here I would have to keep working hard to get where I wanted to be.”
Gletzer scored a try in his Cal rugby debut, Jan. 19, 2013, against UC Davis. But he played less than 10 minutes as a sub against Stanford at the following weekend's homecoming at Witter Rugby Field, leaving the home crowd without any taste of his work rate.
After yielding at halftime of the next match against Arizona to future U.S. National Team player Danny Barrett, playing a steady 68 minutes against Cal Poly and pairing with Barrett in the back row for all 80 minutes of both matches of the 2013 “World Cup” series vs. British Columbia, Gletzer laid out his case as a top collegiate rugby flanker against Saint Mary's on April 13.
The first 40 minutes were not promising, but Cal came back to deal the Gaels their first collegiate loss of the spring. Especially during the second half, it was impossible to miss Gletzer as much for his will to win as from the wind whipping through his dreads. The crowd responded loud and long as he slashed and burned his way for extra meters to help keep Saint Mary's on the back foot.
Gletzer's father, Larry, was in the crowd that day, as he is for most of his son's home matches. “At halftime, I remember sitting in the stands saying, 'Game's over, we're going to win.'” It wasn't the scoreboard, showing Cal down by 15 points, that spurred Mr. Gletzer. “What I saw was the intensity in Alec's eyes and his nostrils flaring. He was absolutely determined to not let his team fail.”
After a final score of 42-31 in favor of the Bears, the traditionally quiet moment usually shared between Alec and his father was interrupted. “There was a lady behind me that was waving at Alec, and he put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Dad, excuse me.' He stepped past me, I turned around and she said to him, 'You're my son's favorite player. Can I get an autograph?'”
Larry said that Alec “smiled his smile” and signed the scrap of paper, and while he was signing, spotted the kid who was hiding behind his mom. “He got down on one knee, waved the kid over and put his arm around him and let the mom take a few pictures.”
Alec Gletzer had arrived as a Cal rugby player with his teammates as well as his fans.
“It really inspires others to play harder when they see how he gets around the field,” said Tiaan De Nysschen, who also teamed with Gletzer in the back row and became an All-American after last season.
“Standing beside him on the pitch before a game, you realize what focus he has and you want to follow him,” Jack O'Beirne, another back-row veteran, said.
Gletzer was also gaining fans that spring in the classroom, among them John Radke, an associate professor in Landscape Architecture and Geography who accepted Gletzer into his graduate-level class in Geographic Information Science.
“I had my doubts about the success of an undergraduate in this course, but Alec stepped up to the challenge,” said Radke, noting that Alec was a regular at office hours, listening to others' questions when he didn't have any of his own. “This dedication and focus, along with the hours of hard work, might just be skills acquired and honed as a student-athlete.”
While rugby is his sole athletic pursuit at Cal, Gletzer has two majors – Geography and Society & Environment – and is on course to receive degrees in both after the spring of 2015. The player who has been dominant in 15s as a flanker is also focusing on becoming an effective 7s player in order to compete for Cal, and maybe beyond, in the Olympic code of the game.
“I felt like my skills got better,” Gletzer said of his most recent 7s campaign. “The effort part of rugby was really all I had going for me, but being able to pass, catch and run has been a big next step.”
“Alec is clearly among the elite players in collegiate rugby,” Clark said. “But within that segment of elite players, his rugby is still pretty raw. It indicates to me a significant upside from here.”
Coach Tom Billups, who leads the team's strength and conditioning program in addition to his on-field coaching duties with Clark, said, “The process of improving is often uncomfortable and Alec had struggled with being uncomfortable in 7s. This year his improvement was, in part, because he was more comfortable in uncomfortable situations.”
Further than discomfort, Clark said, “Alec plays through a bunch of agony.”
Gletzer spent his summer getting stronger in the weight room and said he's the healthiest he's been in a long time. Academically, he's thinking about graduate school without looking past plans to write a senior thesis. While his rugby dream burns fiercely, he also would love to teach in the future.
“The idea of becoming a tenured professor is very appealing,” he said. “But in all these things, the real dream is to keep getting better.”
This story appears in the Fall 2014 issue of Cal Sports Quarterly.
