Canada have named 35 players for their Pacific Nations Cup training squad. The first warm up match is against the Highlanders on Saturday, August 17th at the Capilano rugby club. Canada then face Japan and USA in the preliminary round of the PNC, before the playoff round starts in Japan.
A good initiative from Rugby Canada in organizing these East/West high performance camps and listing the U18 athletes attending. The only negative we’ve heard is the cost to attend, the amounts seem to vary and may depend where the athlete is coming from. They’ve assembled some good coaching teams including active players as assistant coaches.
The match summary is below and the links to the VEO videos, East and West cameras, are linked below as well.
The Bula Rugby 7s tournament will be a 2 day event, Friday August 16th and Saturday August 17th, at John Oliver Park in Delta, the home of the Brit Lions.
Three BC match officials have been named to the World Rugby appointments for the WXV tournaments. Julianne Zussman will officiate at WXV 1 in Vancouver, Chris Assmus will be TMO at WXV 2 in South Africa and Shanda Assmus will officiate at WXV 3 in Dubai. All tournaments take place over September and October this year.
The BCRU announced they are raising service fees by 10% for the 2024/25 season. The fees that are affected by the 10% increase are listed below with the new amount listed. Further details in the BCRU news release appended below.
Seattle is closer to BC and the Seawolves were initially seeded with Canadian talent by Curry Hitchborn when MLR first started in 2018, and Seattle won the first two titles in 2018 and 2019. But now Seattle have lost that Canadian connection, only Reid Davis appeared sporadically in the roster this season, and he wasn’t in the match day 23 for Seattle this weekend. The Free Jacks however boasted 9 Canadians in the roster in the Championship match, so who which team were we pulling for… O Canada.
BC went up 10-0 in the championship final against Ontario but Ontario came back to make it 10-7 BC at the half. Ontario added a penalty to tie the match up at 10-10. Strong Ontario defence won the match as they kept BC off the score sheet in the second half and added a try of their own for a 17-10 win.
It was running, attacking rugby at its finest as the Highlanders backline players accounted for 10 of the 11 tries. It was no secret early on that the game plan was to spread the ball wide and the Highlanders did so successfully with outside centre Melani Nanai providing the key link to wingers Nico Leonard and D’Shawn Bowen. Between the three players they accounted for 7 tries. Mike Moloney was 11 for 11 on conversions.
It wasn’t expected but Canada upset #2 seed Australia, 21-12, to advance to the Gold medal match. Earlier in the quarter-finals they eliminated #3 France who were expected to medal as hosts. Canada couldn’t pull off one more miracle but gave #1 seed NZ a tough match only losing 19-12 to win Silver.