PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA :
The USA Rugby College Rugby Championship 7s (CRC7s ) in Philly, made Philly the place to be, this weekend. There was also high drama out west if you couldn’t make it out east as the USA Rugby National Championships were being held in Glendale, Colorado. Either way, lets get you caught up on all the action and scores.
College Rugby Championship 7s:
After years of dominance in15s, Cal-Berkley seemed to struggle with winning 7s title That is now a thing of the past. Cal’s victory meant Life University went 2 of 4 in championships this year, not bad for both teams. After being placed in an extremely tough group, Delaware were lucky to not make it to the Cup playoffs. The Blue Hens bounced back to take down Notre Dame for the Plate Final. Northeastern also struggled in pool play but the refused to go home without a title as they defeated Virgina Tech. Tournament first-timers Penn managed to get through a rough set of pool matches. They got better as Sunday went on and managed to at least win the shield. Here are the results:
Cup Final: California-Berkley 19 – 14 Life
Plate Final: Delaware 19 – 10 Notre Dame
Bowl Final: Northeastern 17 – 12 Virgina Tech
Shield Final: Temple 12 – 17 Penn
This year’s tournament featured a few other competitions happening at the same time in the lovely PPL Park or at one of the local nearby universities, such as Drexel and Penn. The finals for all the tournament matches were held at PPL Park. In the second annual Women’s division championship game, Penn State had a dominating performance as they won convincingly 31-5 over Ohio State. Our friend and superstar in the world of 7s, Dallen Stanford found time in his busy schedule to coach Occidental College to a 28-15 win over our other friend Don Shanahy ‘s alma mater, Univ. of North Florida in the NSCRO 7s final. NSCRO stands for the National Small College Rugby Organization and its goal is to help administrate and coordinate rugby in smaller colleges and university’s in the USA that can play really good rugby but don’t have the size or numbers to compete against the bigger teams and universities that make a tournament like the CRC7s.
In the inaugural US Military Memorial Cup, Army beat Navy. The military cup featured players from all 5 of the armed forces representing their branch(Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard) in a best of the best round robin. In the High School/Under -19 championships it was not a good day for defending champions. The girls final was between Fallbrook HS (Fallbrook, CA) and Divine Savior HS (Milwaukee, WI). Fallbrook were champions at HSRC 2012 but Divine Savior beat them this year. It was the same story in the boys as last year’s champs Pride (D.C.) went down to Union (Tulsa) to be denied a repeat.
USA RUGBY National Championships : Out in Colorado the championship for the men was being settled. The D3 final, was an instant classic as it required added extra time (or overtime for the novices) before Oceanside came out on top of Old Blue of NY’s D3 side. Way back in september we predicted Wisconsin would win D2 and we got it right as they dominated over friend Doug Coil’s Wilmington RFC. We finally got one right!! And in a nail-biter, Life (yes that same Life University from the Elite Cup and CRC7s final) won the D1 title by the slimmest of margins over Puget Sound.
D1: Life Running Eagles (GA) 27 – 26 Seattle OPSB
D2: Wilmington (DE) 27 – Wisconsin 60
D3: Old Blue of New York D3 40 – 44 Oceanside Chiefs (CA)
That is it for now, feel free to comment below, look for and “Like” our Facebook Rugby Wrap Up Page and follow us on Twitter @RugbyWrapUp, @JunoirBlaber, @Declan Yeats, @Mathew Drew Turner and @Ebstide52, respectively. And until the next time… stay low and keep pumping those legs.
