Does Gary Kemble deserve to be a couch?

Blaise Alter | December 27, 2007, 1:18 am

We want videos!

Wendy Young | November 27, 2007, 1:31 pm

We want videos!

  This and more rugby blogs can be found at http://westrugby.blogspot.com. Thanks!

Remembering...

Wendy Young | November 27, 2007, 1:31 pm

Remembering…

So today I was browsing the rugby blogosphere and fell upon a particular blog post. Chasing Down Life is blogging about her devastating ACL injury (this is her 2nd ACL injury). Upon reading her last few posts over the last week, I almost welled up in tears at work.



I’ve been there. The utter disappointment, rage, torture, more disappointment, realizations…thoughts…sprials…its more than the pain of the surgery and the injury…its everything else that is devastating. Anyone who has been there knows what it feels like…



Her post made me think about my physical and mental being during the recovery of my ACL injury…and lets just say it wasn’t pretty. I tore my ACL on September 24, 2005 and had surgery a exactly a month later (I had severe bone bruising…basically I had tiny fractures in my bones). I too, did not tear anything but the ACL, no meniscus, PCL, LCL or whatever. The surgery was easy enough, I had plenty of pain at night and took plenty of pain medication. I guess I was lucky in most respects, but my frustration came from never really being injured. Sure I had sprained an ankle, tweaked a hamstring…but had never been down and out for more than a month.



I had never really faced myself in the throes of depression and injury. I continued to attend rugby practice every Tuesday and Thursday night and helped with the team where I could. The nights were the worst as I had terrible dreams of tearing my ACL again, dreams of never being able to walk normally and dreams of never playing rugby again. I am a tough girl, but my mind was trying to betray me in my sleep.



In the end I made a full recovery and played my first rugby game about 4 months after surgery (I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS!). The reality of it was that I couldn’t be kept off the pitch…at 3 months, the most critical time of the healing process, I was at practice playing touch rugby. If I had stayed away from rugby during my recovery process, I really think that my mind might have won. The depression, rage, frustration…it might have taken me over.



As I write that statement, I am angry that I sound weak…or that I would have given in. But unless you have been there…you wouldn’t know.



Stay strong Chasing Down Life and don’t let it beat you!

This and more rugby blogs can be found at http://westrugby.blogspot.com. Thanks!

Another Post about the West...

Wendy Young | November 27, 2007, 1:30 pm

Another Post about the West…

The teams in the West are currently looking over the current league system and if it is beneficial or detrimental to teams & competition in the West. My post earlier this month talked about several topics including the geography of the West and about the costs of playing in the West. These two issues combined are hurting players, coaches and teams beyond measure.



Current talks now between teams are revolving about maybe moving back to the Best of the West Tournament, an East/West or South/North format, or a Tier 1 and Tier 2 situation or maybe a few other ideas.

The pros are that each team has 6 high level games that they are required and "get to" play. We are bolstering the competition in the West and helping ourselves grow as a result.



The cons of this format: Teams have 3 home games and 3 away games in a year. These are required league matches and almost all require a plane ticket. The Colorado teams are the lucky ones here as they have three teams within driving distance of each other. Austin has the worst case scenario here (and not just because I play for them) but because we are geographically the farthest away from the rest of the teams in the league. It is literally impossible for us not to purchase a plane ticket to play a different team in our league. (Buy a plane ticket or miss a day of work bc we have to drive 10 hours or more.)

This is basically a tournament where each team works to beat all the other teams. I believe there is some seeding that happens to predetermine your standings for the tournament (I have only played in one of these tournaments).



This tournament style can have its problems though, as it all depends on your team that one day. In the league format you have several chances to prove yourself, at the Best of the West Tournament you lose, you are out.

This topic has been discussed mostly because it is a similar format to what a lot of men’s teams do. Basically you draw a line down the middle or across the horizon and each region plays the teams in its region. However this format greatly benefits Colorado again because they would just have to dominate Black Ice and Boulder…who are currently ranked the lowest in the West League. Either way we try to split up the league it doesn’t seem fair and it always benefits one team or another.

This idea came across the email this morning…and has some potential in my mind. Basically we would go off the current rankings so:



Tier 1

1) Glendale

2) Jazz

3) Sabres



Tier 2

4) Austin

5) Black Ice

6) Boulder



Tier 1 would play the teams within and would fight for the right to represent the West (right now we have 2 seeds, but both seeds will be challenged in 2008). Tier 2 would fight amongst itself to be #1, as the #1 in Tier 2 would move up and the #3 in Tier 1 would drop down. Almost identical to the current National All Star Championships that we have every summer.



A few new ideas were introduced as well, could the #1 Tier 2 team challenge a team in Tier 1 for their spot? Also, how would the D2 teams fit into the mix (the West is working on sending a team to the D2 tournametn in 2008)? Could they challenge the lowest ranked team? There were several other ideas, but these two were of greatest concern to me.



If the West was to adopt this new format, does that mean that Austin, Black Ice and Boulder areut of luck from the 2008 Round of 16? Or do the Sabres drop down and Austin moves up? Then the bottom 3 teams have no chance at Round of 16?

Please leave thoughts in the comments, as I believe we are all open to new ideas and thoughts…



So in summary of all these ideas, there are more questions than there are answers. I just know that the current league system is costing teams more money and is stretching our team officers, players and budget. I think that all this talk is good, and I hope we can all come together to agree on a solution that builds the West up and the teams in it.

This and more rugby blogs can be found at http://westrugby.blogspot.com. Thanks!

USA Rugby D1 National Championship PAST WINNERS

Wendy Young | November 12, 2007, 1:11 pm

USA Rugby D1 National Championship PAST WINNERS

Interesting comments going on at Goff about who has won the D1 National Championships in the past…here is what they have come up with:

79 – Florida State Univ

80 – Florida State Univ

81 – Belmont Shore

82 – Beantown

83 – Beantown

84 – Florida State Univ

85 – Florida State Univ

86 – Beantown

87 – Beantown

88 – Minnesota

89 – BASH

90 – Belmont Shore

91 – Beantown

92 – BASH

93 – BASH

94 – Berkeley

95 – BASH

96 – Beantown

97 – Berkeley

98 – Berkeley

99 – Berkeley

00 – Berkeley

01 – Berkeley

02 – Berkeley

03 – Berkeley

04 – Berkeley

05 – Berkeley

06 – New York

07 – Berkeley

I guessed that BASH was San Fransisco, cause thats what Google told me…Cool stats!

This and more rugby blogs can be found at http://westrugby.blogspot.com. Thanks!

2008 NEW ORLEANS RUGBY RECOVERY EFFORT

Wendy Young | November 12, 2007, 1:11 pm

2008 NEW ORLEANS RUGBY RECOVERY EFFORT

Last year’s effort was a great success thanks to all the volunteers that participated. The United States Women’s Rugby Foundation is once again coordinating volunteers to lend a hand with the ongoing recovery effort in New Orleans.

The New Orleans Rugby Recovery Effort is a volunteer opportunity to spend two days working side by side with other volunteers to help clean up and rebuild homes in the New Orleans area. We will be organizing volunteers for the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity and will assist on one or more of their ongoing projects. Projects will include both the construction of new homes and repair of surviving homes. We have selected the dates of this volunteer effort to coincide with the Mardi Gras Women’s Rugby Tournament.

• Volunteer Group Name: U.S. Women’s Rugby Foundation
  
• Dates: January 30th to February 1st, 2008 (arrive Wednesday PM, depart Friday PM or Saturday AM)
  
• Transportation to New Orleans: Responsibility of volunteer
  
• Food and Lodging: Camp Hope; $ 20.00/day tax deductible – responsibility of volunteer
  
  If you would like to volunteer please send an email to mholmes@uswrf.org. She will contact you for additional information.
  
  PLEASE NOTE: Volunteers will be asked to sign a Liability Waiver Form in New Orleans. Volunteers under the age of 18 cannot stay at Camp Hope but can volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. They will need guardian’s consent to participate at the HFH worksite.
  
  This and more rugby blogs can be found at http://westrugby.blogspot.com. Thanks!

Texas Youth Rugby Association

Wendy Young | November 12, 2007, 1:10 pm

Texas Youth Rugby Association

Girls Rugby has arrived in TEXAS! This weekend (11-3-2007) Traci and I from Austin and Alena and Leslie from Houston traveled to Dallas to do a girls youth clinic. The event was held at Jesuit High School which has THREE boy’s high school teams and you can take rugby as a course!!!

These boys don’t even know how lucky they are, state of the art facilities to practice at (TURF STADIUM) a coaching staff and playing rugby counts towards their GPA. How freaking awesome is that? So we are trying to slowly start the same thing in Dallas, Austin and Houston.

We had about 12 girls at the clinic and we had them from 9am to 3pm. We started them out easy in the morning with a small sharks and minnow game of touch. After they tagged someone they had to hold hands and start working together to get the rest of the girls. Then we moved into a stretching and dynamic warm up with all the girls. They did well and were excited to be doing something besides static stretching I think.

Then we moved onto pop passing, posting and picking the ball and even ball lines! These girls were like sponges, they soaked up everything we said! After each session we tried to do a question and answer and they were able to answer every question and it was just amazing. Before lunch we decided to get tackling out of the way. We were all a little worried that they would be afraid to this, but they jumped right in! We started on our knees and talked about proper placement of your face, neck, hands shoulders etc. They loved watching us tackle each other and kept asking us to do it again and again.

Then we moved to tackling a tackling bag and they did very well! They were hesitant to use their hands though and we kept emphasizing how important hands are in a tackle. After they mastered the bag I got in a tackle suit and let the girls hit me a couple of time each. We also changed the tackling bag to a rucking pad as they were just hitting and bouncing off me now. We noticed again that they were not using their hands so we introduced the rucking pad so they could grab a leg or shorts or whatever they wanted. Overall I was very satisfied by the tackling progress they made and some of those girls could hit hard!

Then we broke for lunch and had some chatting times with the girls. They were very cute and giggly and were very excited to be learning rugby! They wanted to scrimmage (full on tackle) so badly, but we just didn’t feel safe yet. We still had plenty of rugby to cover, so we decided that if they did well we would do a touch session at the end of the day.

After lunch we worked on scrums and line outs with the girls. We again thought they would be adverse to the "touching" that comes with scrumming and rugby. But those girls dove right in and were giving each other their waistbands and scrumming it up! We were able to put together a full scrum and they even drove the scrum machine a bit! The lineout session was really cute as the girls don’t have very much upper body strength yet. Alena and Traci tried to choose the smallest girls for lifting and taught everyone how to lift. At the end they lifted each girl so they could feel what it felt like to be lifted properly. It was very cute!

Next we worked on more ball lines with switches (they picked it up FAST!), looping and crashes. Everything we did was oriented to be a pop pass as we did not think teaching a spin pass would be good on the first day. This is more of an advanced skill and can take some players years to develop. From there we moved to a quick defensive drill, drumming into their heads that rugby defense is together, flat and harder than it looks. This was a short drill as we were running out of time, so we quickly did that and then we moved into the touch drill.

We knew the touch game would be hard to do, so we decided to make it as simple as possible. Alena and I played scrumhalves for the teams after we had split them up and strictly held ourselves to directing and not trying to show off! We had several stoppages over the hour we played touch, some for directions, some for questions…and some for stopping dangerous play.

The touch quickly improved as we introduced more concepts and encouraged them to take the tag and to move quickly into position. They had problems with aligning correctly and at the right distance, so we made sure to encourage those that were doing it right.

The clinic was a huge success and the girls were very cute at the end because they did a cheer for us! Union Rugby and the Rugby Foundation had donated balls, so each girl was able to take a rugby ball and a tshirt home! How exciting!

Traci and I are looking forward to hosting our clinic in Austin on Dec 1st and helping Alena & Leslie with their clinic in Houston on Dec. 15. Stay tuned for flyers, details etc on those camps.

For more information please email the us @ girlsrugbytx@gmail.com.

This and more rugby blogs can be found at http://westrugby.blogspot.com. Thanks!

Geography of USA Rugby Women’s Rugby D1 Teams

Wendy Young | November 7, 2007, 10:37 am

Geography of USA Rugby Women’s Rugby D1 Teams

A reader of this post had asked for an updated map with color coding for all the teams, and I think I have gotten it right. Let me know if I didn’t because I did it really fast and may have made a mistake!

Also if you are interested, the map is "live" at Google Maps here. Some of the place markers are not on their specific location because otherwise some of them were stacked. They are spread outs o you can see them better.

**Thanks for all the comments my rugger friends, looks like I may have it all cleared up now! Is Keystone really in the Northeast and not Marfu? Weird…



This and more rugby blogs can be found at http://westrugby.blogspot.com. Thanks!