— Photo by Vlad Lodoaba '06
— Game summary from USA Rugby
From the team's blog: "In the words of Coach Ward Patterson, Middlebury College had a 'dream come true' end to their season taking a solid game plan to the Arkansas State Indians and winning their Division II national championship match 38-22 at Stanford's Steuber Rugby Stadium." More »»
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — The Middlebury men’s rugby club plays in its first national championship game on Saturday, May 5, at Stanford University’s Stueber Rugby Stadium in Stanford, Calif. The game takes place at 1 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time and will be streamed live at http://www.usarugby.org.
Middlebury's
rugby club featured on WCAX TV in Burlington, Vt.
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Middlebury beat Maryland’s Salisbury University, 59-14, in a national semifinal game on April 22 in Sanford, Fla. In California, Middlebury will meet Arkansas State in the Division II final. Arkansas State beat 2006 national champion Coast Guard by a point, 25-24, in the other semifinal. Senior flanker Chas Wirene was ecstatic following the club’s win over Salisbury: “I can’t describe it,” he said on the team’s web log, http://viewfromthepitch.blogspot.com. “We’re going to California. This is the perfect culmination of a fun four years of hard work!”
Middlebury’s rugby club has been to the nationals in the past, but had never made it past the quarterfinals. They opened the 2007 tournament by beating the top Division II seed in the West, the University of Northern Colorado, 39-27. They then defeated the Middle Atlantic top seed, Salisbury, in the semis, in what Coach Ward Patterson called “the best game of the year.”
Arkansas State has reached the college playoffs seven of the last eight years and made it to the finals in 2004. “We need to keep up our intensity,” Matt Volz ’07 told Middlebury’s student newspaper, The Campus. “We're all very excited right now, and we need to carry that over into the championship game.”
Tickets to Saturday’s match at Stanford, which will be followed by the Division I women’s championship at 3 p.m. and the men’s D-I final at 5 p.m., are available one hour prior to kick off of the first match. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children or students with ID. Admission is free for anyone with a valid military ID.
For those unable to attend or watch the action live via the web, a highlight show will air this summer on the cable/satellite channel CSTV, at dates and times TBA. In addition to its live web stream, USA Rugby will update scores from the matches at Stanford on their web site’s scoreboard found on the front page of http://www.usarugby.org.