When the star player of an elite prep school rugby team suffers an emotional collapse, his friends and teammates respond in their own ways, ranging from heroic to horrifying.

Two Welsh coal-mining brothers win a trip to London to claim a monetary prize. They are supposed to meet a newspaper reporter who will be their escort. Instead, the brothers are launched into an adventure with some London riff-raff. It is up to the reporter to look out for the brothers, and what a job it turns out to be!

During the year 1962, a young prepubescent boy in rural Austrailia watches painfully as his best friend and first love, an older girl, blossoms into womanhood and falls for a thuggish rugby player, setting off a chain of events that irreversibly changes the lives of everyone involved.

Rick Penning, the 17-year-old star player on his coach/father's rugby team, lands inside the Wasatch County Juvenile Detention Center following his second drunk driving conviction (and where his father leaves him to rot). Mistrust and dislike of the situation makes Rick anything but a model prisoner, but counselors at the center nonetheless hook him up with the Highland Rugby Team, a team renowned for its long string of successive state championships. Its coach, Larry Gelwix, has a surprisingly unexpected philosophy: train boys to be champions in life first, then on the field. Rick doesn't buy into this, which could earn him some time in State Prison if he doesn't turn his life and attitude around by the time he turns 18.