The men’s rugby team played a game against the Springfield Rugby Football Club on Saturday, Feb. 29. The Gorillas lost the game (5-24).
Club President and junior in business management Jarrod Tayrien believes the team played well despite having new players and having a few players that were not at the game.
“I think we did pretty good, especially coming into the game we knew that this is the toughest team we are gonna play against the entire semester,” Tayrien said. “We did have a few injuries prior and… people that didn’t show up to the game, but I think we did, honestly, really good for the outcome of how the game went. We did have several new players that joined the team maybe two or three weeks ago. So, I think we did really good honestly.”
According to Tayrien, the team did pretty good considering they played a men’s club.
“We did pretty good going to the backline, trying to get the ball to the backline and see what happens and did pretty decently…,” Tayrien said. “We were just out sized in a couple areas, especially in the forwards. We did alright overall. I mean there was nothing really spectacular that we did but we just did simple stuff that we were able to use to our advantage.”
There were a couple of things that the team needs to work on before going into their next game.
“We need to work on our ball security,” Tayrien said. “We did have… issues with that, especially in the first and second half. There were several times they were able to strip the ball when we were getting tackled and we did fix it at the second half, (in the) later half in the second. So, we were able to fix it, but it was already too late especially with how the score was going. We need to improve on that. We also to improve on our rucking because we were very late on rucks. We couldn’t get to it and they were able to strip the ball in that way too. So, they had possession of the ball during the entire game.”
The men’s rugby team has a doubleheader coming up against John Brown University and University of Missouri- Kansas City on Saturday, March 14. Tayrien is looking forward to playing a college team this weekend.
“For the next game, I’m hoping to see our newer players come out again because after the game, they had a really good time,” Tayrien said. “As a team, I hope we can fix the issues that we had during our other game. This time we’ll play against college teams instead of mens teams. Mens teams are always a lot bigger than us college boys so that’ll be like a really nice break from playing against mens clubs. So, that’s what we’re really excited for is playing against other teams that are about our… weight or sizes…”
Tayrien hopes to see people come out to the next game and enjoy a day of rugby.
“I just want to see all of our fans come out to the next game on March 14,” Tayrien said. “We will have a doubleheader for both men’s and women’s teams, so we’ll have rugby all day that day too.”