Rugby rules
The men’s rugby Stingers (above) finished the regular season with a 5-1 record. The defending Quebec league champions will be looking to follow the same playoff path they did last year, when they beat Bishop’s in the first round and then captured the title on McGill’s field.
Concordia split their regular season meetings with McGill, losing 19-11 on the road and winning 19-15 at home. There is potential for a rematch on Nov. 5.
photo by Corey Narsted
The Concordia Stingers women’s rugby team suffered a heartbreaking playoff loss last Saturday to the McGill Martlets, but despite that, head coach Graeme McGravie says the team made “awesome strides” this year.
The 10-5 defeat to McGill was the closest the Stingers have to come to beating the Martlets since they lost by the same margin in the provincial final in 2000. In the past six years, the mighty Martlets had run up an astounding 103-game undefeated streak against conference opponents.
Concordia almost pulled off the upset at McGill when they pushed over the goal line near game’s end, but were unable to press the ball on the ground to score what would have been the tying try.
Nevertheless, the Stingers amassed a 3-2 record this year, jumped one spot up the conference standings from the previous season, and showed a marked improvement in their points scored versus points against ratio over 2005: 201-18 compared to 47-111.
“When we hit camp in August, I knew right off the bat that we had a pretty special group of people,” says McGravie, who completed his second year at the helm of the women’s program after three years with the Concordia men’s side.
A big reason for the Stingers’ improvement was increasing the number of team practices to five times a week, up from three last year and two the year before. McGravie’s players also committed themselves to the off-season conditioning program that began in January, and played rugby with club teams over the summer.
“It’s a big priority, and people didn’t understand that last year,” said fourth-year Stinger Jennifer De Guise, who was named Concordia’s Athlete of the Week in September for scoring five tries in an 81-0 thrashing of the Bishop’s Gaiters earlier this season. “This year, I really felt that the commitment was there. They took it seriously.”
For McGravie, the point when he truly realized his team was for real was when the Stingers handled the Ottawa Gee-Gees, who had been McGill’s main challengers for the past few years, at Loyola in a 27-0 victory.
“My first game as coach last year was against them, and they scored against us on the kickoff. That was my introduction to women’s rugby,” McGravie remembers. “I was really shocked (by the win over Ottawa). At halftime, because we were only up 7-0, I was like, ‘OK, we can still lose this,’ but all of a sudden we just put them away.”
McGravie was pleased with the team’s progress this year, and hopes the future will produce even better results as they follow the same recipe for success.
“The players have trained hard,” he says. “They’ve worked hard on and off the field together, and it pays off. They’re really a team.”