The first thing about Abby Vestal that grabs your attention is a smile so powerful it could brigthen Fyodor Dostoyevski’s darkest pages. It suits her social personality and instantly puts those in her company at ease.

Competitors beware: That smile also masks a competitive streak that blends with physical gifts of size and speed, mental advantages of superior focus and natural athletic instincts to make the last sport she found the pluperfect fit for her.

When Vestal met rugby, it was love at first fight. That’s really what rugby is, a team fight. To play it is to fight for possession of the ball, for closing the gap quickly enough to tackle the opponent, for summoning the will to get off the ground after being tackled to continue running and ultimately for winning.

Abby Vestal

Vestal’s goal is to become so good at the sport she earns her way onto the Olympic team. She received an invitation to the American Rugby Pro Training Center in Little Rock and showed enough in four days that she was invited back to play in a series of games against Mexico’s national team. From there, she returned home to her job with the Boys and Girls Club of Lawrence. She intends to move to Little Rock at the start of July to reside and train at the ARPTC, devoting all day every day to becoming a better rugby player. From there, she hopes to receive an invitation to the Olympic training center in Chula Vista, California. Women’s rugby will make its Olympics debut in 2016.

Vestal was nothing if not a fighter at Lawrence High, where she became the first girl to play for the school’s football team, was a soccer star and a scrappy basketball player. She played soccer at Johnson County Community College. She played professional football in the men’s arena league and in a women’s league in Kansas City.

“I love football,” said Vestal, 26, in the wistful manner of someone discussing a lost loved one.

Still, it wasn’t until she was in college that Vestal found the sport she was born to play.

“I was at a friend’s house in Lawrence and the people who were there all played rugby,” Vestal said. “Someone just tossed out that I played football in high school and the enitre rugby team jumped on me to get me to come out and play.”

She wasted no time in joining Kansas University’s Div. II club rugby team.

“The next day they had practice and I said, ‘OK, I’ll be there.’ I’ll never forget my first game,” she said. “It was October 31st, 2009, against Kansas State. It was a Halloween game.”

At that point, Vestal still was a terrific athlete masquerading as a rugby player. With more rugby experience, her instincts flipped and she became a rugby player masquerading as a football player.

Before receiving the invitation to Little Rock, Vestal had been training with the KC Titans, a woman’s football team, “for about a month.”

“It was like, ‘Oh, I need to tuck the ball, instead of running with it out here (holds it out in front of her),'” she said. “Whenever I’d score a touchdown in practice, I’d touch the ball down. In rugby, whenver you place the ball down, you have to kick the conversion kick straight back from where that ball touched down. So every time I’d score a touchdown, I’d run to the middle and touch it down. My brain was wired for rugby.”

At the club level, rugby is a 15-on-15 sport. At the international level, it’s called rugby sevens, a seven-on-seven game played on the same size field.

Jules McCoy, head coach at the ARPTC in Little Rock, described sevens as, “a gladiator-type sport. They put Gladiator A vs. Gladiator B in an arena and see who won? Try seven-on-seven like that. Seven gladiators in blue, seven in red.”

The games feature seven-minute halves of running clock, except during stoppages in play.

“In football, plays last an average of 15 seconds with 45 seconds of rest,” McCoy said. “In rugby, it’s continuous. In football you would put a period after the word tackle. In rugby it would be a comma, and maybe seven commas in the same sentence (because a tackled player can get up and keep running). It’s cool, a very addictive sport, a lot of fun to play. Everyone I know who plays it has loved it.”

Vestal cited that absence of scripted plays as one of the features she loves about the sport.

“I love contact sports,” Vestal said. “You take football and soccer, my two favorite (pre-rugby) sports and put them together. You have to think on the spot like in soccer. You get the ball and it’s, ‘Now What?’ Split-second decisions, which I really like. You’re spread out and constantly moving, like in soccer. Tackling is really the only way it’s like football.”

Vestal has been working out daily at the Jim Thorpe Fitness Center on the campus of Haskell Indian Nations University.

“I love it there,” she said. “It’s amazing. It’s a little rough around the edges, but that’s what I love about it.”

In pursuit of what she always has wanted — competing in a sport against the highest level of competition — Vestal will leave behind a good life, saying goodbye for a while to her home in Lawrence, the cherished visits to her parents’ house in the country near the border of Eudora and Lawrence, her job, her friends, her pets.

“My life is going to completely change in July, which I’m very excited for and very terrified,” she said.

Abby Vestal terrified? Not a chance. Nothing scares Abby Vestal.

“Besides spiders, I think you’re right,” Vestal said.

Snakes? Her albino corn snake’s name is Corneila.

Rats? Her pet rat, Finnegan, has a a gray head, a gray stripe down his back and otherwise is white.

She keeps her three quarter horses at her parents’ house and has two cats, a turtle and a school of guppies. Her dog, a pitbull, naturally, answers to Lynley.

“I have a zoo,” Vestal said before flashing her signature smile.

And she has a dream to represent her country in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Being asked to return to the training academy in Little Rock was the first step.

McCoy didn’t make it sound as if urging Vestal to return was a difficult decision.

“No. 1, she’s a gamer,” McCoy said. “You can tell she really likes to play the game. It’s easier for her to get in the zone. With so many distractions now for young people, there aren’t many athletes who are like that. Abby has that attention management, 100 percent to what’s going on then and there, and then you add to that hustle, athletic ability and she just naturally got the game.”

Referred to the training center by a football teammate, Vestal quickly passed the good teammate test, according to McCoy.

“She didn’t know anybody here and she jumped right in and it wasn’t difficult for her to jump right in,” McCoy said. “Other residents enjoyed playing with her. Somebody joins your team and is pretty good you want to play with them. She made everybody happy and it made Abby happy. When everybody’s happy, that makes me happy.”

Little Rock is one of four rugby Olympic development academies. The best of the best move on to Chula Vista, where the best of the best have a chance at replacing members of the current national team.

Vestal’s chances?

“A lot of it depends on her,” McCoy said. “She’s athletic enough, gets the game well enough. She just has to put the work into it. She’s athletic enough. She has natural instinct. If she puts the work in, she could find herself getting to the Olympic training center. I don’t see why not.”

Striking that perfect balance of pushing one’s body to the maximum without injuring it, an inexact science, requires wisdom and luck. The academy, armed with athletic trainers and instructors, gives her her best shot. Vestal has been writing fundraising letters to corporations to help defray the costs and repeatedly expressed gratitude over the support of her parents.

“You’re only young once,” McCoy said. “Her time to try it is now. Worst-case scenario, she doesn’t make it and she’ll look back at this as, ‘I had a great time, fantastic experience, met a lot of cool people who all wanted the same thing.’ “

Not knowing whether she has what it takes would nag Vestal forever.

“I’m really excited to get down there, be 100 percent focused on becoming the best I can be and see where I stand next to the other athletes,” Vestal said. “There will be sacrifices made and I’m absolutely willing to make all of them to chase this dream. I haven’t ever been so determined to do something as I am right now.”

Anyone who has ever watched Abby Vestal chase a dream knows of her boundless determination.