Your Scrumhalf Connection - Women's Rugby Blog

Why that picture you ask? Because after our team check-in we headed over to the National Sports Center and watched a little cycling! It was actually pretty exciting as the guys and gals raced around and catapulted each other too!

We actually got down into the "pit" of the velodrome also as I guess anyone can be down there. So we had about 10 West ruggers down in the thick of it cheering our favorite riders on. Our favorite race by far was the "relay" race...or that's what we called it. They were in teams of two and their method of passing the baton or releasing their partner was to grab each other and catapult each other. It is similar to the drifting technique used in Nascar racing. It was pretty awesome and very entertaining to watch.

Anyways, more rugby is needed in this post! Yesterday we had a second training in the afternoon and it was highly productive. We split immediately after our warm-up and worked on unit skills. The forwards were seen scrumming, doing line-outs and being forward-like. The backs were spotted running and running and doing some standing around. They did some plays and some kicking as well.

Haha, sorry I'm a little tired and the specifics of yesterday are already stored back in the brain somewhere. As for today we had training at 11am and we got right down to the nitty gritty. Sara Edwards and I worked on our kicking for about a half hour and then we split into forwards and backs. The backs worked on finessing our plays and really working hard to straighten up...makes the work easier for everyone that way! The forwards worked on their line-outs a bit more and had some live scrummaging going on. We also did some important shadow work and we had a short captain's run at the end. When Mark turned and told me to run it...I was surprised, but ran it without to many blunders! Ha.

After the training we chowed lunch and immediately got in the pool. At first it was just a few of us, but then we had almost the whole team in there. Of course we quickly got bored with marco polo, so we just started jumping in ALL together and seeing how big we could make the waves. Check out the video below for a pretty funny site!



Then we had a captain's meeting where we went over all the plays, possibilities, kick-offs and more. It was good to sit down with everyone and make sure we are somewhat on the same page. We play our first match tomorrow at 10am against the South. We tried to scout out their practice today but they were done before we could watch.

The all important jersey ceremony was right before check-in and I started it off as captain. I love jersey cermonies, they are usually very emotional and motivating. This one was pretty light hearted as we are a pretty light hearted team. We can often be found laughing instead of paying attention. But we get it done when it counts!

Shout-out to my mates on the Beaver Tour! Last heard they were almost to Ft. Stockton!