Blog #12

These next few weeks are insane in terms of commitment to rugby. Last weekend was the first weekend of the three-week long sprint towards the end of school and the beginning of championship season. This past Sunday we had a tournament over at Babson College, the roster was a mix of A and B side player and I was put in the starting line-up. For the level of competition at the tournament compared to the players we had rostered we did really well, and I was proud of everyone. We finished third after losing a hard-fought quarter-final to Endicott and went on to beat the University of Maine by a large margin. It is also E-board election season and we received our early nominations for the positions at the tournament which led to some mild anxiety among the team as people were deciding whether or not to run against their friends or to even accept the nomination. I was nominated for a handful of things, all of them would entail me running against my closer friends on the team so I was hesitant to accept. Then on Monday, after a grueling practice, we had our elections. As is tradition, the seniors on the team all get drunk before the election process begins so we had to wait for them to finish drinking at an undisclosed location before we could start. The waiting was the most nerve-wracking part- I did not have any speeches prepared and I was planning on just saying whatever came to my mind at the time and hoped it would work out. Which it did. I was elected to be the next captain of our 15s side, ranked #5 in the nation. It is a lot of responsibility and expectation that I’m hoping I can manage, the captain from two years ago plays on the US Eagles, the A side for the US National team. Our current and soon to be former captain, is graduating and she too has an impressive record with professional and semi-professional teams, long story short I have big shoes to fill. After the meeting though, I was very stressed. For context, I had two final presentations the next day, one of them at 8 am, and still had work to do with my groups after the elections which were scheduled to end at 9 pm, but they did not end until just after 10:30 pm so that was painful. Thankfully I was still able to meet up with one of the groups and get a significant amount of work done before heading home to shower off.
This upcoming weekend is one of great anticipation for rugby players in the Northeast. It is beast weekend. It’s the weekend where rookies become veterans, vets for short, and the seniors have their last hoorah. Before we get to the festivities, there is a big 7s tournament up in the northern part of Maine. It is the championship tournament for our seven’s league, and I am once again hoping to be rostered. The top 8 teams from our league, Northeastern ranked #1, will compete to be champions of this year’s NEC7C league. It will definitely just be an A side roster and because we only have one van this weekend and our coach is riding in it, we can only roster 11 people. Normally rosters consist of anywhere from 12-15 people so it will be hard to make that final cut, but I have been trying super hard at practices and have played well the last few tournaments so I’m hoping that’s enough to get me on that list of names. Also, apologies to anyone who actually reads my blog posts because they’re pretty much exclusively about rugby. Probably because it’s the only semi-interesting thing in my life at the moment. Anyways, see y’all in class tomorrow.