Season Opening for Men’s Rugby

 

This Saturday was our first game of the season, and for many, their first game of rugby. It was under the scorching Californian sun that we fought against the USD’s Toreros. USD is historically known to be better than UC San Diego at rugby, but despite having mainly rookies on our team, we made the Toreros work hard for their win.

 

Even if about a third of our players never played rugby before, they applied the little that they were taught within two weeks of training. Very few penalties were called and everyone played hard.

 

The rewarded back and forward of the game were Noah Lee and George McMahon respectively. Noah ran several great strike lines and broke through USD’s defense to score our first try, earning him the honor of Back of the game. And George played with an impressive intensity putting the Toreros on their heels after every run.  Another notable player from this match was Pierre Karpov completing an impressive try from deep in our own 22. Pierre with great awareness initial kicked the ball over the entire USD defense and successfully chased the ball giving one finally kick to reach the Toreros try line were Pierre dove onto the ball for the score.
Our performance was, of course, very far from perfect and this is why our practices are now focused on correcting the recurrent errors that were noticed during the game. We are currently working hard on adjusting our defense and setting up a counter attack, and we hope to apply that next weekend against Point Loma Nazarene University.