West LAU D1 Championships Writeup & Videos

Originally posted on austinvalkyries.com:

The Austin Valkyries traveled to Aurora, CO this past weekend to compete at the West LAU Championships. Going in as the 2nd seed for the event we faced the hosts of the tournament, Black Ice in our first match on Saturday. Our warm-up and preparation for the game was a bit lackluster and it showed in the first 20 minutes of the game. After that though we started clicking! The Valkyries scrum was incredibly strong and kept Black Ice on their heels the whole game which allowed our strong backs to pour in the tries.

With our new coach and philosphy of go foward and dominate the ruck we were able to have clean ball and our backs ran with quick support from the forwards. Final Score: Austin 26 Black Ice 15. Player of the match went to Traci Schmidtke for her defense and for poaching about 100 balls.

West D1 Championships: Austin Valkyries vs Black Ice from Scrumhalf Connection on Vimeo.

Our second game of the day was against our rivals, the Glendale Raptors. We knew this was going to be a difficult game but we have been preparing for weeks for this match. Once again the our scrum absolutely dominated the Raptors and we stole their scrum ball often. It was evident that they didn’t want to scrum against us because we were give a re-kick on a kick off that wasn’t 10 meters and any not straight lineouts were a do-over. The score was within 2 points until about the 65th minute when the Raptors put on several tactical subs that were able to help pour on 3 tries for Glendale to seal the game. Glendale 41 Austin 26

We played our hearts out and guess what, we will more than likely see Glendale again in 3 weeks at the CR2 TOurnament in Chicago. Congrats to the Austin Valkyries as they qualified for the USA Rugby Round of 12 Playoffs with their win against Black Ice. Round of 12 will be in Austin, TX on Oct 30-31, 2010.

West D1 Championship Final: Austin Valkyries vs Glendale Raptors from Scrumhalf Connection on Vimeo.