The BC Rugby leagues have shut down for the winter break but there is rugby to watch both locally and online this weekend. The 7s Series kicks off in Dubai, the Mexico 7s U19 tournament starts on Saturday, locally there’s the Pacific Pride vs Seattle at Starlight Stadium on Saturday and on Sunday the Provincial Youth Club Championships at UBC.
MLR have shown a bit about the 2024 season but haven’t released the schedule yet. There are a lot of questions around the U20 program and the JWRT tournament that haven’t been answered yet. There’s word that the U18 program is on the chopping block. MacDowell Rugby announce the girls team heading to the Mexico 7s.
A few items to cover Monday morning of interest to BC and Canadian rugby fans. MLR, when is the schedule coming out? The USA searching for a new CEO. Canadians playing in the top European league. The BCRN archives slowly come back online and we’ve featured some stories from Zaruba, Moylett, Bain and Marshall, plus the 2022-23 BC Premier articles are back online
I met Barry Kelly, one of Lunk’s friends and one of the initial investors in ScrumMaster, over a pint and we talked about the early days of ScrumMaster. It all started with the merger of UVic Vikes Old Boys, aka Valhallians, and the club adjacent to UVic, Velox, around 1987. They merged as the Velox Valhallians. Kevin Wirachowski aka Lunk was from UVic and Barry was from Velox. As the ScrumMaster records state, Lunk began tinkering with scrum machines in 1986 but didn’t build his first one until 1991, that one went to Velox. It was a prototype machine, he built a second prototype and that went to Cowichan, where Tony Medina, the other investor was a member.
[editor’s comments below]
We’re moving the site Sunday night, expect a slightly new look on Monday morning.
There are a variety of rugby topics coming across the Editor’s desk in the last couple of days. We’ll start with something local.
Collegiate Webinar
Adam Roberts runs an annual Collegiate Rugby Webinar where he puts together rugby athletes in the grade 10 to 12 age group (and their families) with university rugby programs. He also brings in a College Rugby Advisory consultant to explain the landscape. The poster below has the details, he’s adding more university programs but currently UBC, UVic, TWU, UBCO, Western Washington, Central Washington, Guelph, UPEI are signed up.
A recent article in the Squamish news highlights the problems some rugby clubs are experiencing in finding field access, which is essential to growing the game. Turf fields are especially valuable as they allow all weather access during the wet BC winters. Even established clubs have issues during extended periods of rain as the municipal Parks & Recreation boards seem to be setting tighter restrictions on grass field use.
A brief note to let readers know what’s going on. The server host decided to migrate the BCRN site to a “new and improved” server on last minute notice and in the process broke the site. The existing code didn’t work and I’ve been busy trying to rewrite some parts of the code to get everything working. You may have noticed BCRN down for a day or two. Making matters worse they migrated a week old database and we’re missing stories from August 5th to 11th. So if you thought there was a recent story but now can’t find it, that’s the reason. I’ll try to get that fixed over the next few weeks.
We had been using a Twitter feed for clubs on our home page, if your club was on our BCRN club list then you could tweet something out and it would show up on the BCRN home page. Well that, like many things on Twitter lately, stopped working this week.
There’s been some negative reaction to the rugby giants colluding together to have their own party during the summer and fall test windows. The Planet Rugby article calls it the “death of Tier 2 rugby”, Americas Rugby News states, “Changes are set to hit International Rugby like a hurricane.”