The BCRU have announced the U18 and U16 teams entered in the Vancouver Sevens Invitational to be hosted at UBC. The event runs alongside the World Rugby Vancouver Sevens which is hosted at BC Place. The invitational tournament takes place on Thursday and Friday, the main sevens event takes place Friday to Sunday.
With little rugby happening in BC and Canada right now I thought I’d go back to January 2020 and revisit the Canada U18 tour to California to take on the USA U18 teams and then a couple of touring sides from South Africa. The tour started in December 2019 and finished up in January 2020. The tour included 6 games in total with 4 wins and 2 losses for the Canadian teams.
A couple of events are coming up in January for the Thunder Indigenous Rugby program. First is a youth rugby camp at White Rock on January 25-26. The registration link is here, you can also email jlyall@thunderrugby.ca
The BC Bears boys won their Bowl quarter-final over Belmont Shore from California, 19-7 but lost the semi-finals to Saracens 33-5. Saracens would go on to win the Bowl final and claim 17th place. That would put the boys ranking as 19/20 place at the tournament. The boys tournament was won by the Australia U18 team.
CV Rapids out of Comox Valley won both the Girls U16 and U18 titles, defeating Abbotsford 29-7 in U16 and claiming the double over Abbotsford with a 12-10 win in U18. CW out of Oak Bay won the Boys U18 with a 36-31 win over UBCOB Ravens, Abbotsford defeated CW in Boys U16 by a score of 10 to 7 to claim the title.
The Fraser Valley clubs Abbotsford and Langley did well in the Kamloops 7s elite divisions, Abbotsford won the U18 Boys top division plus the U16 Girls top division, Langley won the U18 Boys top division plus the Boys U14. James Bay from the Island won the U16 Girls top division plus the U14 Girls.
The Club Age-Grade or Youth season starts September 29th. There are seven weeks of regular season play, 2 weeks of regional playoffs and the final is December 8th at Starlight Stadium in Langford. The finals in December will pit the top U16 and U18 teams in the Province against each other in both the boys and girls divisions. The U14 competition is regional only.
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.
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.