NASC – Day 5

Today we decided that the Super 8 has become our home! We sleep, eat, hydrate, party, play pranks on each other and then finish it all off with more sleeping. Our rooms are scattered messes of rugby gear, cleats, mouth guards, shoulder pads…and whatever else we thought we needed for this journey. You have become closer friends with your roommates, closer than you ever thought! Room 119 has survived the arctic weather, a flood at 4am and overusing of febreeze. Its weird to think that after tomorrow we will have to return to the real world…

Today we trained at 11am, we arrived at 10:30am so a few of us could work on kicking, passing and get stretched out. The muscles are pretty sore from three days of training and a hard game yesterday. Luckily we haven’t had any serious injuries of any of our players, everyone is pretty tired and bruised up as expected though.

Yesterday’s lose was hard to take as we knew that we didn’t play our best the first half. We were very lethargic and some miscommunication in the backs meant missed tackles. Those missed tackles were hard to recover and meant they were able to put the ball under the posts. The officiating was very lopsided as well as we had 15 penalties and they only had 1 in the first half. Spectators that had never seen rugby were even quick to point out that the South was given forward pass after forward pass and knock on after knock on. We tried to ignore the officiating and make sure we were disciplined but we were penalized over and over again. The South put up 25 points in the first half and thought they had sealed the deal.

The second half was a different story though…we had worked out our miscommunication problems and had finally woken up. Off some great 8-man picks and quick rucks out to the backs we were finally able to put some points on the board. Once we got some points on the board we knew it was going to be rough to overcome 39 points, but we tried anyways. I made a penalty kick from about 25 meters out and we were on our way. It was 39-10…and we tried to keep to momentum going. Once again the officiating came into play as we had 8 penalties in that half and they were given 2. It is hard for me to believe that they played that perfect of a game.

The final score was 39-20 and we had fought a hard battle. I have never rucked so much in my life and the forwards had never ran so hard and fast! The South was pretty excited at the end of the game as they had just created a huge upset. I was however disappointed as I was getting the ball for a conversion on one of our tries though. I was picking the ball up and one of the girls was saying “Don’t worry about that try ladies, the West sucks and has sucked for years…” I couldn’t believe it! What nice tact and good sportsmanship. Suffice to say I knocked down the conversion from the corner and quickly spread the word to my teammates. Disappointing really, as I had thought they were a formidable opponent and was giving them the good job speech, but not anymore.

So we have recovered from our hard loss and are moving forward. This afternoon we had plenty of time to entertain ourselves. Some girls hit the Mall of America and some just hung out at the hotel. I hung out and did some work and then took a well deserved nap. I had thought about going to the mall, but was frankly tired of talking about rugby and needed a break. You know how it goes!

Tonight was a good night as we had a great team dinner and the rookies did their skit! See the video below (its bad quality because of the lighting…we tried to put the blinds down…but negative).

We play tomorrow against the Minnesota motley team at 9am. Wish us luck! The U23s play around 2:30 against Mid West.