St. Joseph’s Prep announces that Mark Brandon is the new Director of Rugby and Head Varsity Coach. He is taking over the role formerly held by Tom Dugan ’78, who will remain in a key leadership role as Director of Operations and Finance as well as D2 head coach and collaborator.

 

This is not Coach Brandon’s first time with Prep Rugby; he worked as a volunteer assistant eight years ago when he first moved to Philadelphia.

 

“I am humbled to be able to be a part of this incredible Rugby Program and build on the hard work that Coach Dugan, Coach (Brian) McCloskey (’91), and others have established here,” says Brandon. “When you walk out to practice and see over 100 young men there, many of them trying the sport for the first time, that’s a testament to how inclusive this program is. I haven’t experienced that anywhere else.”

 

Brandon, a native of East London in the UK, has been playing rugby since age eight when his soccer coach, noticing how often he fouled in soccer, sent him over to the other field. “I have always gravitated towards sports that have contact,” says a laughing Brandon, who added football and lacrosse once he arrived in suburban New York as a high schooler. “When I first got to rugby, I thought ‘these are my people.’”

 

He went on to play at St. Lawrence University, where the team won the NY State Championship in 1997, and has played on several rugby clubs, including in White Plains where the team won the Met Union City Championship.

 

He then transitioned to coaching. He won two conference championships at Haverford College before the onset of COVID. In 2022 he moved to Drexel University for two years before joining the Prep. A teacher at AIM Academy in Conshohocken for students with learning differences, Brandon says that rugby has always been a part of his life.

 

“Whenever I moved somewhere new, rugby was where I would go to meet new friends and make good support networks,” Brandon says. “Rugby has done so much for me in my life in helping me be my best self, challenging me physically, mentally, and intellectually. Of all the sports I’ve ever played, I have found rugby challenged me most and it is where I can feel good about myself.”

 

He wants that feeling to extend to his players at the Prep, a school that he says shares the same guiding principles that the sport of rugby does. “The Prep teaches you to be a Man For and With Others, putting others in front of yourself, and so does rugby. It requires that all 15 players on the field and all 25 players on the team are in service to one another. That is what breeds success on the field and in life.”

 

That is also his coaching philosophy. “I feel like I am good at helping other people and bringing out the best in my players on the rugby field and in the classroom,” Brandon says.

 

He is also very proud to be a part of the Prep Rugby Program. “When I talk to rugby friends across the country, they all know and respect the Prep,” he says. “That speaks to the excellence and competitiveness of the program; the work that Tom and Brian and the other coaches have done behind the scenes: the fundraising, the amazing trips that they have created. It is such a tight knit community. I want to ensure continuity, continuing the excellent work that has already been laid down. I am so excited to work with these coaches and grow with them and the young men of the Prep.”

 

Brandon and his wife Amanda, a teacher and basketball coach at Friends Select, have three children, two daughters and one son, a 10-year-old who Brandon coaches in a summer rugby youth league. The family lives in Springfield (Montco).