Rugby transitions from club to team

Aedan Branigan-Brown ‘21

With the Guinness Six Nations tournament having concluded, rugby has once again scored in the public eye. This year Wales took home the Championship Trophy, making it their 40th title.

Despite this recent rugby news, that isn’t the only major happening for the sport. The season for the Catholic Central Varsity Rugby Team has officially started.

For the past four years, rugby at Catholic Central has been a club sport. Despite this, the team has still shown the dedication and hard work of any varsity sport. The training regimen doesn’t just consist of putting in countless hours in the weight room. Running at practice is a necessity, as are drills to strengthen every player on the 15-man team.

Scrimmages over the preseason have shown vast improvement in many of the players. Summer conditioning was right on schedule, but practices for the season were late, starting only in early March instead of the regular January due to Covid-19.

16. The team faced tough competition in a hard-fought match. The ultimate result was defeat for the Shamrocks. Despite this, the team will bounce back, and has plenty of potential. It’s a young team, with only two seniors on the roster, Thomas Newell and Captain Jack Stephens.

Stephens remains confident in the team for the rest of the season. “We have a very young team this year and they are still developing. We just had a lot of guys play their first game, and most of our team is really new to the sport,” he said. “If I had to bet, by the end of this year I would expect all of these guys to be exponentially better..”

Over these past four years it’s been seen that the betterment of players is what CC Rugby does best. The primary example of this is Stephens himself. On signing day, he committed to Adrian College for rugby. The rugby program is new at Adrian, and Stephens had the honor of being their first official signing.