On a bright May day in Abbotsford, with a gusty wind blowing straight through the pitch from the south, two worthy finalists met to determine who would take the spoils and who would suffer a first defeat in months. Having played to a tie in February it was anyone’s guess who would prevail, the grizzled club men or the finely tuned student cohort.
The women’s Island Blue vs Mainland Gold series starts later this month with the ID sessions starting May 10th. The national team coach, Kevin Rouet, stated “the BC Blue vs Gold Series is the best standard of Rugby we can provide to senior female athletes in BC. These games are an important part of the pathway for athletes to access the Canadian National Senior Women’s program or Canada Select team. I am very excited to see athletes playing in a multi-game format and showing consistency in performance in these high-standard games.”
The Canadian women won Bronze in LA at the World Rugby 7s final, their future looks solid as they look to compete in the 8 team World Rugby division 1 series next season. The men’s program, not so much, they lost to Kenya in the 2nd/3rd playoff for entry to division 2 and now the Canadian men’s path back to division 1 looks very complicated.
There weren’t any upsets on finals day as the predicted top ranked teams completed their championship titles. Ravens won the men’s Premier, Thunderbirds the women’s Premier. Other titles went to the Burnaby men’s Div 1, the Meraloma women’s Div 1, the Kamloops men’s Div 2, the Comox women’s Div 2 and the Langley men’s Div 3. The rosters below are from the BCRU Program.The live stream links are included below.
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It was a familiar story for the women’s XVs, rely on the forwards to come through in the crunch. Canada and USA were tied at 14-14 in the second half with sloppy backline play by Canada contributing to both USA tries. The forwards came through at the 71′ mark with a maul try to go ahead and the backline finally clicked at the 77′ mark to put the game out of reach.
World Rugby has unveiled their new format for the 7s game going forward next season. It follows the earlier report from a Uruguay journalist which we reported on April 18th. What impact will it have on the two Canadian teams competing this weekend?
MLR Round 11 was a bit different as it started on Tuesday, ended on Sunday and 3 teams ended up playing twice! There were 25 Canadian players in action, 14 starting and 11 in reserves. Houston leads the West on total points but Utah with a game in hand lead in points per match. New England has overtaken Chicago to lead in the East.
After a four-week layoff the Ravens stepped back onto the pitch on a sunny day at Jericho to contest the BC semi-final game against its most recent opponent, Westshore. And as the vendors selling trinkets to the cruise ship passengers say it was “same, same, but different”. The Ravens won comfortably but Westshore played at a high pace and consistently challenged the Ravens defence as they did at Cowichan in March.
The finals have been set, in men’s Premier it will be Ravens v UBC, in the women’s Premier it will be Westshore v Thunderbirds. In other finals it will be JBAA v Burnaby in men’s Div 1, Abbotsford v Meraloma in women’s Div 1, Kamloops v Brit Lions in men’s Div 2, Comox v Nanaimo in women’s Div 2, Burnaby v Langley in men’s Div 3. All the match results are listed below.
We saw this on Bayside’s Instagram page and thought it was a great idea. We have been contemplating setting up some sort of Job Board on BCRN to serve the BC Rugby community. The BC Rugby community is fairly tight, if I don’t know you, I know someone who does, 2 degrees of separation. That level of connection between rugby connected employers and rugby connected job seekers offers a built in level of trust and vetting.