At least I got the pass off before being destroyed…
If the title doesn’t give it away coming so soon in the spring playoff season, we were unfortunately knocked out by Old Blue in the National Round of 64 playoff game.
It was a battle, with Old Blue shooting out to a 23-0 lead to start the game. We buckled down with some impressive defense and ended the half down 23-7. We almost added two additional scores, to the one breakaway try we knotted, but came up just a couple meters short each time in our drive. Old Blue did end up bringing some floaters who play on both their D1 and D3 sides down, so I’m proud we were able to stick it out and finish with a respectable 37-10 final score. Funny enough, we did get an interview with national rugby news source rugbymag.com about it here, although I don’t think those players affected the results much in the end.
Watching their games in the Round of 32 (against Buffalo) and Sweet 16 (against Seacoast), they put up scores of 42-10 and 54-22, so it’s nice to know we can hang around with some of the best competition in DIII rugby. Speaking with Old Blue’s coach recently, they’re actually bumping up to DII next year, so that’ll be one roadblock we don’t have to worry about.
Now that the playoffs are over, we had time last weekend for the 2nd Annual I-90 Rugby tournament. The usual suspects were there including Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse.
Although we had a slow start against Albany, losing by a try or two, we managed to pick it up and put the hurt on Rochester (About 75-5), and surprisingly Buffalo (33-7). If only we played Albany after getting our groove on, who knows what could have happened. Quite the difference from last year, when we lost to them 70-13.
Buffalo Rugby had a nice write-up on their website about us too:
Syracuse is a methodical, well-organized team, and used their aggression and cohesion to good effect, while fatigue took hold of Buffalo. Physical exhaustion manifested itself in several mental lapses. Whether poor passes, knock-ons, or just generally slow response time, every type of BRC mistake was punished with the Chargers putting points on the board. Only at the very end of the game could Buffalo string together multiple phases, and that resulted in a converted try for BRC’s only points, in a 33-7 loss.
A good time was definitely had by all, especially with semi-decent/non-rainy weather for once. I’ll be following up shortly on a development where I tried out for the US Olympic 7’s Rugby feeder team in NYC this past weekend. Went quite a bit better than expected…
(Photos by Rob Emhof)
IronRugger 