Rugby hopes for trip to sunny California

For the first time since 1999 the Tech Rugby Club is headed to the playoffs. Tomorrow in Athens they will play their first-round match.

After a successful fall season, the team is now in the middle of their spring season and looks to have a strong playoff run.

" The team ' s looking real strong. We ' re really maturing our game, really stepping up and playing physical rugby, " said David Blanton, a senior Management major, who is rightfully nicknamed Goliath. " There ' s a real strong chance we ' re going to push through the next round and be in the regional final. "

The rugby club plays in Division II of the 19-team USA Rugby South Division. These 19 teams are then broken up into five conferences. Tech competes in Conference E along with Georgia Southern, Auburn and the University of South Carolina.

Tech finished first among these four schools to earn a spot in the playoffs, where they will face the No. 2 ranked team from Conference D, which is comprised of four universities from the state of Florida. There are seven divisions nation-wide. The winner of the South Division makes it the round of eight, which will be played this year in Santa Cruz, Calif. (Since there are only seven divisions, the top two teams from the Pacific Division qualify.)

No Tech rugby team has made it to the round of eight, but in 1999 the team was one win shy of making the trip to sunny California.

The USA Rugby playoffs are spread out over many weeks. This means the rugby team continues to play regularly scheduled matches during the tournament.On March 5 Tech hosts Bowling Green, a team that Rugby Head Coach Dan MacDougald describes as a " perennial powerhouse. " They have won the Mid-American Conference for over 20 consecutive years and have amassed over 1500 wins in their history.

But the rugby team has been upsetting higher-ranked opponents all season. As Club President Brett Markwort mentioned, the team has beaten UGA in all four matches this school year even though UGA was the favored team in all of the contests. UGA is a Division I USA Rugby member.

The season is divided into two parts. " In the fall we play any team that wants to play us. We play men ' s teams, college teams and we play in tournaments, " Markwort said.

The fall season gives older players the opportunity to get back into playing condition, and it gives newcomers a chance to get experience. This past semester the team worked on developing the B side, or the second string. " In the fall our main goal was to create a valuable B side. There ' s 15 players on a field at a time and we start a game with our A side. And we like to have the best B side possible. That way we can practice and have full scrimmages, " Markwort said.

Conference competition began in the spring, and the rugby club faced the three other teams in Conference E in addition to several other matches. The conference record is the only thing that matters in securing a spot in the playoffs.