A rugby club based in a sleepy town of just 20,000 people just east of Moscow is supplying 14 players of Russia's 30-man squad for their maiden Rugby World Cup appearance.
That's more than any other club in the world has provided for any of the other 19 teams at the competition, which starts Friday in New Zealand.
Monino is home to Russia's top club, VVA-Podmoskovye, and looks like many other Russian towns.
It has many run-down apartment blocks, a Lenin statue, long roads lined with birch trees and dotted with kiosks.
But Monino has a few extras, like an Air Force officer training college, an aviation museum and - even rarer in Russia - a small rugby stadium that is regularly filled to capacity with excited fans.
Reftkat Sattarov, the club's general director, says rugby is in the blood in Monino.
"It's a forty-year tradition here," he says. "Teenagers play it in school, they love it."
The sport, which first appeared in Tsarist times, was immortalized in Monino through its association with national hero Yury Gagarin, Russia's first cosmonaut.
Gagarin played a few games when based at nearby Star City for his training, and VVA's team title included his name until 2002.
VVA, a Russian acronym for Air Force Academy, was originally set up in Moscow in 1967 as VVS MVO, or Moscow Military District Air Force. The club moved to Monino in 1968 and became VVA, winning the Russian Republic championship that year.
The link to aviation was cemented with the appointment of Major General Vladimir Ilyushin to the post of president of the Soviet Rugby Federation. His father, Sergei, was the founder of the Ilyushin aircraft design bureau.
In 1971, VVA won the wider Soviet Union championship for the first time and went on to dominate for the next 40 years. The club was often first or second in the Soviet Union and then in the Russian leagues, usually battling archrivals Krasny Yar from Krasnoyarsk, the country's other rugby center, for the top spot.
The club won the championship of Russia eight times, the USSR championship nine times, and has come runner-up five times in both. They have taken the last five championships straight.
VVA made history in 2009 by becoming the first Russian team to play an English Premiership side, losing to the Northampton Saints by 61 points to 17.
Despite the thrashing, the Saints were impressed by their opponents and this year signed fleet-footed wing Vasily Artemyev.
As for the future, Russian rugby looks set to remain centered in Monino, where a new 12,000-capacity stadium is being built that will have under-soil heating, and host the national team and corporate events.
A recent decision to include rugby sevens in the Olympics has unlocked government funding that will be plugged into rugby development throughout the regions including Monino.
Morevoer, should VVA realize their goal of participating in the European Challenge Cup, the continent's second-tier competition after the Heineken Cup, the arrival of high-quality opposition will spur the club onto greater things, director Sattarov says, and ensure Monino's links with the fledgling sport remain firmly in place for the foreseeable future.
