The Canada U20 team are departing Monday for the Oceania Rugby U20 Challenge in Fiji. This warm up match will give coach Christiaan Esterhuizen a chance to evaluate players in match conditions before they depart. They will be playing an Island XV team collected from the 5 Island Premier teams, JBAA, CW, Westshore, UVic and Pride.
Belmont, who have a strong synergy between their football and rugby programs, doubled up with both Senior and Junior titles in the boys Island high school rugby 7s championships. The top four teams in the senior bracket will advance to the Provincials in Abbotsford, joining Belmont will be Vanier (2nd), Spectrum (3rd) and GNS (4th).
There will be a celebration of life for Brent Johnston at Windsor Park on May 24th. There will be drinks and food available. They are expecting a decent crowd so they are advising that besides the usual Windsor Park parking, there is extended parking at Oak Bay Marina with a short two block walk to Windsor. There will be donation jars for a fund that Brent held close to his heart. Drinks have been kindly sponsored by a variety of folks, JBAA and Cowichan each contributed kegs.
MLR Round 13 goes from Friday to Monday and in this round, unlike the previous two weeks, there weren’t any double matches for teams. There were 23 Canadians in action, 12 starting and 11 in reserves. New England are ahead in the East division and Utah in the West.
It was a relatively quiet week for the senior boys, but the huge story was the Claremont juniors defeating Oak
Bay convincingly, 38-22. It was only their second win of the season, but the machinations of playoff seeding
saw them leapfrog Oak Bay and SMUS into the top spot. More details below…
I saw Tyson Beukeboom had written an article a couple of days ago for the World Rugby online portal, RugbyPass. It’s a quiet Monday rugby-wise, I had just returned to the office from a weekend visiting my daughter and grand-daughters so this seemed like a good way to start the week.
Update: Canada’s U20 Women’s Rugby Team wins 26-15 over Ireland in their first of two friendlies in Dublin.
Scorers: Ava Ference (1T), Amber Edgerton (1T), Fiona Day (1T, 1C), Ivy Poetker (1T), Brooke Roddham (2C)
The Canada U20 women play Ireland U20 on Saturday in a match described by the Irish Rugby Union as an, “uncapped training match”. The match kickoff is 1pm local time and 5am on the west coast. There doesn’t appear to be any live stream available. There wasn’t any Rugby Canada media release but a graphic on social media with the 28 player roster. The Irish Rugby Union did publish an article and it’s posted below along with their 30 player roster.
Rugby Canada have completed the announcement of their summer/fall schedule for the men’s XVs team with the Canada v USA fixture in Calgary on August 22nd. That will give them 5 games between July and September, possibly 6 if they finish in the top 4 at the Pacific Nations. World Rugby have also announced the full schedule for the Pacific Nations. Both reports are listed below.
MLR Round 12 like Round 11 started doubling up games for some teams, Utah and San Diego had games on Wednesday and Sunday. Utah leads in the West and New England lead in the East.
