Phaidra Knight, 2017 World Rugby Hall-of-Fame inductee, has been the second American to earn the honor. Her new initiative, Peak Unleashed, uses rugby as a way to improve outcomes for incarcerated, special needs and sexually exploited young adults.
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Phaidra Knight, a retired rugby union player who was a member of the United States national team from 1999 to 2017Reported in 2018 by the Prison Policy Initiative, statistics show that on any given day, nearly 53,000 youth are held in detention facilities. Recidivism is calculated on a national level. However, it is up to each state’s discretion on how they track juvenile recidivism.
This initiative has been over two decades in the making. It began while Knight attended law school. She has always been athletic, but during undergraduate school, she decided to focus on her studies rather than play a college sport. “I had this urge to reconnect with team sports,” she explains. “I met a lady at a law school party who invited me to come to a rugby training. At that point, I had never heard of rugby. I didn't know what it was.
Rugby became more than just a sport for Knight. “It was an opportunity to kind of work out a lot of emotions that I was unaware of that I had harbored over a lifetime,” she shares, “things that I had to contend with as a child that I essentially buried. Rugby was a canvas for me to kind of paint that picture and start opening up in order to heal.” Growing up, Knight experienced chronic domestic violence. Rugby gave her the opportunity to express her anger through a controlled environment.
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