The Canadian Touch Rugby Nationals will be held at the Westshore rugby club on Saturday and Sunday, June 28th and 29th. The Meralomas are defending champions. Teams will be coming from the east Montreal/Ottawa (Montowa) and Toronto, from the south (Portland, Seattle) and from BC (Victoria, Meralomas, Scribes, Samurai). Early intel says the Samurai team, organized out of Vancouver, may be one of the early favourites.
On June 12th there was a 59 player extended squad announced, that has further been reduced to 42 players for the pre-match camp and the final 32 player list will be announced in July. There are some big names missing from the original 59 player list, just in the backs Andrew Coe, Spencer Jones, Shane O’Leary, Josiah Morra aren’t on the list, they would have been contenders for starting spots. Mark Balaski, Tiarnan Neville are missing so the #10 selection gets narrowed down. The forwards are less affected with most of the projected starters present.
A new CEO and a new President in quick succession, it will be interesting to see what direction the BCRU takes with the changes at the top. Andy Margolis is COO at Vancouver International Airport, originally from the UK, as is the new CEO, Matthew Carter. Margolis worked at Heathrow Airport holding positions as Head of Operations, Airport Security Manager and Terminal Manager. He also had a term as Operations Manager – Neighbourhood Policing Team at Thames Valley Police. He brings a lot of background skills to this new position.
The 2025 MLR season comes to a close next weekend when New England and Houston compete for the title at Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It’s a 10,500+ stadium that is home of the Rhode Island FC, of the USL. It will be a contest between a team with the most Canadians in the league, New England, against a team with no Canadians, Houston.
The BCRU released their annual report with financials. The 2024-25 Annual Report in .pdf format is available for viewing online. We’ve highlighted some quotes below and a graph of their numbers. An overall evaluation, from my point of view, is that they’ve done well at the age-grade levels growing the game, the Kamloops 7s is a case in point. There’s work to do in the high performance end, especially with the senior men which has been quiet at the regional and provincial level. The reality is the financials are one of the major constraining factors which is why they brought in a new CEO to tackle that issue.
A couple of stories from across the world involving Canadian rugby players. Tyler Duguid who plays for Montpellier in the Top 14 has been selected for the France XV vs England XV. It’s unclear whether this is the official France “A” team which would capture Tyler for France and eliminate him from potential Canada selection down the road or if this is just a France XV which doesn’t officially capture him for France. Either way the chances of him playing for Canada now seem very slim. The match will be streamed on rugbypass.tv on Saturday.
It’s late Thursday and on a slow rugby news day I’m calling the #TBT option, Throwback Thursday. It all started when RugbyPass the news site owned by World Rugby ran an article on club championships around the world, you can read the article here. It was titled, “Every champion in club rugby across the world in 2024/25”, of course Canada wasn’t mentioned, it mentioned South America, USA, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, England, Netherlands, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Romania, Georgia, Argentina, Japan, South Africa, NZ… but not Canada.
The Canadian women assemble for a camp in Perth, Ontario from June 20 to 27 before departing to South Africa for matches on July 5th and 12th. The 33 players from the Pacific Four Series are joined by 5 additional players Sophie de Goede, Madison Grant, Paige Farries, Pamphinette Buisa and Carissa Norsten. The big news is the return of Sophie de Goede, her first action since she tore her ACL about a year ago. After the training camp 32 players will be named for the travelling squad.
The Rugby Premier League kicked off on Sunday, it’s a 2 week 7s tournament in Mumbai, India. The reason it’s of interest to Canadian rugby fans is there are 7 Canadian players competing. The competing players are Liam Poultan (Bengaluru Bravehearts); Kyle Tremblay, Ethan Turner, James Thiel (Kalinga Black Tigers); Elias Hancock, Rhys James, Briar Barron (Mumbai Dreamers). There are 6 teams in the league and 3 have Canadian players.
There are 23 Canadian players taking part in the MLR quarter-finals, 4 of the players aren’t on the Canada extended list Guiseppe du Toit, Reegan O’Gorman, Seth Purdey, Josh Larsen with Ethan Fryer listed as Injury Pending.