Monday's Musings

This result places Canada along with six other countries, into the Tier 2 Tournaments to be held in Nairobi, Sao Paulo and Montevideo.  The top four finishers will go into the BIGS for the coming season.  This is the most exciting news in a long time for Canada men’s rugby.  Well done, ALL.

A complete report can be read HERE.

 An interesting side bar, that being CW’s junior product, Lockie Kratz’s captaincy of the Sevens team bears mention. The CW Age Grade program provided the rugby beginnings of current captains, Lockie and NSWT XV’s, Sophie deGoede.  Both players started in minis around the same time and went on to have great athletic careers at OBHS, excelling in basketball and rugby.  More recently, both have shown amazing grit, patience, resilience, hard work and avoidance of frustration that defies reality.  They have recovered from debilitating knee injuries that probably would have put an end to rugby for the average player.  CWRFC is immensely proud of these amazing rugby players.

Speaking of amazing things.  What an amazing weekend of glorious winter weather in the capital!  The writer took some time out on Saturday to take in inter-union action for women’s supremacy in the Ruth Hellerud-Brown, Inter-union Cup.  This turned out to be a disastrous contest with UBC, with sub-union status, showing absolute mastery over what appeared to be an almost totally VIRU Tide Developmental team.  The final score being registered elsewhere with the “Vancouver Thunderbirds” scoring over a century of points to a lone VI try!

 

This, in my opinion, is detrimental to the growth of the game.  One assumes that the VI Tide is a “selects” program where the best players are chosen rather than an open-ended invitation to try out for the team.  Where does this program fit into the development pathway?  I may well be wrong, but was it Kevin Rouet I saw at Windsor Park?  If so, I wonder what he thought about this debacle.

 

UVic, UBC’s island counterpart, chooses not to play in the BCRU competition, with their sole emphasis on USports play.  Thus, several probable available and suitable players for the VIRU did not appear.  In conclusion, items mentioned in this blog are my sole queries and summations being those of an interested and somewhat knowledgeable (a debatable adjective), fan.  I am not sure just what it is that I conclude from all of this.  I believe that the forty minutes of play that I watched were far from healthy for a game that this status should command, being little more than a practice session for all involved.