After quickly setting up the goal posts, pads and rope barriers and a quick warm up to get used to each other. The match kicked off a couple of minutes past 7:00pm and that’s a credit to the lads in helping set up everything and then getting ready. Coach Bear had the Red team and I had the Blue side.
It was fun watching the new lads who had never played this exciting game, with the returning players leading encouragement and direction. Then after 10 minutes of running around with reckless abandon, they discovered that they in fact knew what to do on the pitch and began doing it.
The Red Team – Erbold, Dr. Joe, John, Yis, Jimmy, Ahmad, Steve, Scott, Otto, Cameron, Stephen, Brian, Dominic, Derrick, Chad, Trevor, Alejandro, Justin, Jonathan, Steven, Joe.
The Blue Team – Alex, Ryan, Nate, Weston, Ben, Mohammad, Justin, Steven, AJ, Evan, Austin, Vince, Brandon, Graham, Luke, Marc, Nobie, Arturo, Marcus.
While both Bear and I didn’t care about winning or losing or what the final score would be, it was a very entertaining match. Both sides were attacking and defending and using their team-mates to do what it takes to play. The scoring was very well balanced and each team traded scores, and unofficially the Red team won the match 27 – 24, but we didn’t care about the score because UT Dallas won the actual game.
It was great watching the lads (all 41 of them) doing what we’ve been able to teach them in 3 weeks time and now that we have the basics, we’ll begin to begin unit skills as well as team skills in preparation for next week’s St. Edward’s Round Robin Rugby Tournament in Austin. Both Bear and I feel that we should do quite well with all the lads playing on the same side instead of against each other.
As far as the tournament goes, as soon as I have information regarding time and anything else pertinent to this entire day, I’ll post it for everyone. But what I do know is there will be 5 maybe 6 clubs competing in this one day tournament (including us). We should get to play 3 to 4 shortened games for the entire day and everyone should get to play at least 2 matches.
I’d like to thank all the parents and fans that came out to watch this scrimmage on Family Weekend at UT Dallas and those that came to Fuzzy’s Taco Shop after the match. It was great meeting everyone and a special thank you goes out to Kathlene Simmons for bringing enough cake to feed the entire team in celebrating her son Nate
birthday. We have a very good schedule ahead of us and we should have a lot of fun and would like everyone to
come out and enjoy this ride with us.
If anyone has any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me
and I’ll do my best to get you answers.