The home side Yeti Rugby were dominant in the women’s 7s competition, outscoring opponents 175 to 22, and claimed the 2025 women’s title. The men’s XVs competition was a lot closer with Vernon winning the final by one point over the Terrace team.
There are 3 tournaments to wrap up the summer 7s season, starting this weekend at Bayside, then Burnaby on the 16th and then over to the Island for the Westshore 7s on the 23rd. Details on the posters below.
World Rugby confirmed what they had hinted at in an earlier media release in April, that the Tier 1 JWC U20 tournament will be expanded from 12 to 16 teams. Today they released more details, the tournament will be hosted by Georgia and that the four extra teams will be Fiji, USA, Japan and Uruguay. Fiji because they were the last team relegated in 2024, and the other three as they finished 2nd to 4th at the 2024 JWRT.
An excellent end of tour match for the U18 Dog River Howlers as they defeated the German National U18 team 24-15 to finish the tour with 3 wins from 3 games. The team was predominantly a BC U18 team with 23 of the 28 tour players from BC and coaches from St. George’s and Shawnigan schools. The match video can be viewed here.
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.
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 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.
The Canada Summer Games are taking place in St. John’s, Newfoundland between August 8-25. The Rugby 7s takes place Aug 11-13. In 2022 it was just U18 women’s Rugby 7s, won by BC, but in 2025 it will be men’s U20 and women’s U18 Rugby 7s.
A couple of news stories today, maybe more to add later today. Bayside are looking for a men’s head coach for next season, starting in August. See the ad below, their Insta is @Bayside_RFC
The Hong Kong 7s starts tomorrow with the women’s team kicking off at 7:30pm PT against Japan. Meanwhile there’s another tournament taking place in Hong Kong that involves Canadian players, that’s the prestigious Hong Kong 10s. Canada doesn’t have a team entered but there are 7 Canadians on the Hong Kong Football Club women’s team, called the HKFC Ice.