This past weekend the PSC women’s rugby team hauled themselves down to Portsmouth, Rhode Island to attend the annual Beast of the East Rugby Tournament. A whopping 74 teams, minus the disintegrated and absentee Plymouth Men’s team, turned out to shed blood and sweat with their comrades on the pitch.
Saturday dawned warm with a cool breeze, and the Plymouth team went to the field early to scout out the competition. After viewing the Colby College team kicking the crap out of Boston University, Plymouth knew that Colby would be their biggest challenge of the day. At two in the afternoon Plymouth took the field against BU and set the tone of the game with wing Kori Armiento driving one into the tri zone in the first five minutes. To follow would be Adrienne Allaire diving over the tri line, captain Maegan Roussin with a practically-patented fake pass and weave through opponents for three easy tri’s, Jen Sinacore driving one in, Jen Nedoroscik supporting on the outside and making it happen, Ashley Hokanson with two scores and Kate Rohr with an extra hard push tallying up the score to 54. Boston University’s scared offense was spotted doing the “pee-pee dance” (i.e. carrying on like they needed to use the facilities while holding the ball and waiting for a formidable Plymouth scrummy to plow them over) on several occasions, while the team rucked over them like a herd of rhinoceros. Boston University all but lay down and let Plymouth walk over them to score by the end of the game and Boston “obviously” failed to score on the Lady Marauders.
With the elation of this win slightly faded and a wet drizzly evening setting in, Plymouth anxiously set up to kick off to Colby College. They Colby girls were tall and lanky and showed their speed right from the beginning. Their scrummies played like backs with constant passing and well-aimed kicks as well as bursts of speed. The Colby team threw off messy passes when any semblance of a ruck or maul would start to form and one of their quick players would bring it around and up, gaining them better and better field position until they scored. The one and only time during the game that Plymouth had any sort of good field position was off of a few good rucks and some short bursts straight up the field. Apparently the referee had something stuck in his whistle because he failed to call Colby on any feeding on scrum downs, off-sides or playing the ball on the ground in rucks. He did manage to catch every knock-on by any player, whether real or imagined and blow the whistle to indicate that Colby’s manly scrumhalf had scored once again. The game ended with Colby shutting out Plymouth 30-0, and the Plymouth players walking off the pitch disheartened and slighted at the loss.
On Sunday, the Women dove into the Toilet Bowl portion of the tourney with enthusiasm and managed a 43-0 shut out against the cocky, if slightly hung over, Holy Cross team. Kelly Peckham saw an opening in the defense and used her speed and agility to start the game off right with a tri, and Tarsha Pageau, Laura Lassins, Molly Moulton, Nedoroscik, Rohr, and Hokanson all got theirs over the white line of victory during the game. The high level of intensity kept Plymouth on top throughout the game and spurred them to an awesome win.
The last game of the weekend would pit Plymouth against some bigger and harder-hitting opponents from the University of Rhode Island. The URI women showed aggression equal to Plymouth’s right from the start, and everyone on the Plymouth team had to take their game up a notch to compete. Notable rookie Kate fuller could be seen hitting girls twice her size all over the field and playing with as much heart as one can muster. Kori Armiento finally drove the ball in for a score most of the way through the first half, but Plymouth had to play like it was a 0-0 game to stay on top of the intense URI desire to win. Throughout the game, the level of play began to degrade to where players on both sides were making dangerous high tackles and some silly mistakes. In the end, URI managed to beat Plymouth with the winning tri in the last three minutes of play. With so little time, despite good intensity and phenomenal support from players and fans on the sidelines, Plymouth just couldn’t recover and lost in the semi-finals with only one tri to URI’s two. Some fantastic support was seen on the part of the Plymouth women, both on and off of the field, and all can hold their heads high after a hard-hitting, head-splitting weekend of Rugby,
THE toughest game.