Thanks to Peter Muirhead who put together these league tables for the weekend of January 25th 2025. He’s included a playoff “snapshot” which will be updated each week as the standings change.
The three BC universities took the top 3 spots in the first tournament of the three tournament CanWest series. The big surprise was TWU edging UVic for second spot as they won the head to head 12-5. UBC were the dominant team in the tournament going undefeated. Adia Pye of UBC was the leading try scorer with 8 tries, scoring at least one try in each of UBC’s matches.
Canada finished 4th in Perth, their best finish of the season to date after finishing 8th and 5th in previous tournaments. Canada now sit in 5th place, 8 points behind USA and 2 points ahead of Japan with 3 tournaments left before the final.
Rugby restarts this weekend in all divisions except Premier, which starts next weekend. The current standings going into the spring schedule are listed here.
A couple of MLR preseason news items that impact Canadian rugby fans. The LA franchise is in Fiji to play the Drua this evening, the team includes 6 Canadian players. Also the Seattle Seawolves match vs Canada Selects, scheduled for Feb. 7th has been called off, the Seawolves will play the local Seattle club side instead.
The Steve Meehan hiring is basically old news, most Canadian rugby fans aren’t happy but they’ve moved on. Which is why it’s difficult to understand why RugbyPass posted a Rugby Canada explanation today (January 21st) that was extremely poorly presented and not very credible. It’s an Ai (artificial intelligence) voice reading a script to slides, it’s not very convincing.
There’s not a lot of published data on the number of women’s caps so we reached out to Liz Montroy, the Rugby Canada Communications Manager, and she sent this data. It will be updated with more information, such as match/date of first cap at a later date, but this is a good start.
This is a rugby wrapup for the weekend of January 18th 2025. The BC Rugby leagues resume next weekend in most divisions except Premier which is February 1st. UBC toured down to Washington State for an exhibition match. The PWR, Premiership Women’s Rugby, in the UK wrapped up Round 14 with 16 Canadians in action. We have more details on those below. Coming up on the horizon is the Six Nations, and yes for members, we will putting them up for download, as we have since 2016. The Six Nations schedule is posted below.
Thanks to Peter Muirhead who put together these league tables, they represent the league standings going into the spring season which starts next weekend, January 25th in most leagues, February 1st for the BC Premier.
RugbyPass, owned by World Rugby, published an article on Scott Lawrence, the USA head coach (and GM), this week. It’s worth a read, it outlines his plans for the men’s XVs rugby program and how the U20 and U18 teams fit into that picture. It also talks about the results he’s getting, 3 wins in November against good teams, Portugal, Spain, Tonga, raising USA to #15 in the world rankings.