The chiropractic profession's rugby program has been producing doctors since 1960 — at the only college in America where every rugby player is a student of chiropractic.
The rugby program at the chiropractic profession's founding college was started in 1960 by Dr. David D. Palmer — the grandson of D.D. Palmer, who discovered chiropractic in 1895, and son of B.J. Palmer, who developed it into a global profession. David D. Palmer served as president of the college through the program's founding years and chose rugby for a specific reason: it builds the kind of doctor chiropractic patients need.
Rugby is a collision sport played without pads. It demands toughness, intelligence under pressure, and an almost surgical understanding of the human body — what it can absorb, what it can produce, and where it breaks down. Those are the same traits that distinguish the doctor of chiropractic.
For more than sixty years, the program has done exactly what its founder intended: produce graduates who understand the body from the inside out, who have personally taken impact, given it, and recovered from it — and who carry that hard-won knowledge into their clinical work.
This is, to our knowledge, the only college in the United States where every member of the rugby team is also a doctoral student in a clinical health profession. The implication is profound: every player on the pitch is, at the same time, learning the anatomy, biomechanics, neurology, and rehabilitation of the body they're putting on the line every week.
It means the team trains with a kind of integrated knowledge no other rugby program in the country can match. It also means the alumni who come out of the program enter their careers as chiropractors with something most of their classmates don't have: years of direct, embodied experience with the population they're going to spend the rest of their lives treating.
Between 1960 and 1980, the men's team won multiple collegiate rugby championships. As the program matured and many of its players continued past graduation, the team moved into the senior club division of USA Rugby in the 1980s — competing against the strongest adult clubs in the country, not just collegiate sides.
The senior-side success has been substantial. The men's team has won multiple Midwest Rugby Union championships and advanced to the USA Rugby National Championships on at least five occasions, with the following notable finishes:
The team competes today in the Midwest Rugby Premiership (West Division), home pitch at Centennial Park in Davenport, Iowa.
The women's rugby program was established in 2004 by Dr. Tracy Francis-Nguyen, a graduate of the college who recognized the same value the program had been offering men for over four decades — and built something equivalent for women.
The women's club has earned the Midwest Champions title twice — in 2019 and 2021 — and in 2022 reached the USA Rugby national playoffs for the first time in program history, marking a milestone for women's rugby at the school.
Today, alumnae of the women's program practice as chiropractors across the United States, Canada, and beyond — carrying the same identity as their male counterparts: doctors who came up through rugby, with all the toughness and bodily knowledge that demands.
Six decades on, the alumni network is global. Hundreds of chiropractors who came up through the program practice across the United States and in chiropractic communities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and beyond.
Many alumni have gone on to particularly notable careers in sports chiropractic — working with professional teams in the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, and the major rugby leagues, treating Olympic athletes, and serving as team doctors for college and high-school programs. The shared background of having played the sport themselves gives them a credibility — and a clinical instinct — that classroom training alone cannot produce.
This directory is the first comprehensive public-facing record of that network — a working tool to find a brother or sister near you, to refer a patient with confidence, and to make visible the global community of practitioners who started with rugby and built careers in chiropractic.
Chiropractic was, from its founding in 1895, a profession concerned with the structural integrity of the human body — and rugby, for all its violence, is a sport that demands the same understanding. Players don't just hit; they fall, they get back up, they protect each other in the maul, they sprint and stop and pivot at angles that strain every connective structure in the body.
The doctors who come out of this program have spent years on the receiving and giving end of those forces. They understand intuitively how the spine handles axial load. They've felt their own rotator cuffs unwind in a tackle and put them back together themselves. They know what twelve weeks of post-concussion recovery feels like, not from a textbook but from experience.
When one of them becomes your chiropractor — or your patient's chiropractor — they're bringing all of that to the table.
Add yourself to the directory and become part of the public record of the network.
Add your practiceContent on this page draws on the official Palmer College rugby pages, the Palmer Rugby Wikipedia entry, and standard sources on the history of the chiropractic profession. Alumni with additions or corrections are invited to use the submission form.