The first win of the season was better late than never for the St. Albert Rugby Football Club’s (SARFC) senior women’s team.
The women put their first points under the win column on the season Saturday afternoon at the SARFC grounds in Riel Park, beating the visiting Grande Prairie Sirens 34-22.
“It’s a big weight [off our shoulders],” said outside centre Marcia Davis. “I’m glad it happened. It’s unfortunate that it happened so late in the season, but you learn by playing, so this is when we learn.”
“We’ve been close in a lot of games, so it’s finally nice to get that first one where they can believe that they can win again,” added head coach Cory Albrecht. “It’s been a while for sure, but since we split into the second half of the season, I don’t think we’ve been out of any games.”
Albrecht added the difference on Saturday, compared to the rest of the season, was a little bit of desperation in the final minutes.
“That could be a turning point in the season right there,” he said.
“Every time we play,” Davis added, “we found something we can work on and we’ve improved along the way. Today, it just shows how far we’ve come.”
St. Albert was 0-7 in the Edmonton Rugby Union’s spring classification round, and had been 0-2 so far in second division play.
The win came at a bit of a cost, though, as flanker Caitlin Pan suffered a serious ankle injury mid-way through the first half. The injury was deemed so serious, an ambulance was called to the field.
Davis said the players tried not to let the seriousness of the injury affect them when play resumed.
“We tried to concentrate on not focusing on it,” she said. “Injuries happen; that’s part of rugby. You can’t really focus on that. That’s one in a million; that’s not going to happen every time.”
Prior to the injury, St. Albert jumped out to a 19-0 lead thanks to tries by Davis, Katelyn Moorhouse and Kirsten Porter.
While paramedics tended to Pan, the teams moved to an adjacent field to resume the game, and Grande Prairie stormed back, scoring three tries before the end of the half to cut the lead to 19-17. The Sirens then took a 22-19 lead eight minutes into the second half with another try.
But St. Albert regained the lead when Jen Newman dove into the corner of the end zone in the 66th minute to make the score 24-22.
The SARFC ladies would not relinquish that lead, with Davis adding her second try of the day in the 70th minute and fly-half Kaitlin Davis finding a hole and scampering over the try line in the 81st minute to seal the win.
Davis said bouncing back was part of the mental game.
“We knew we had to keep going. We can’t get cocky just because we got three tries in there. That’s not the end,” she said. “You need to play like it’s 0-0 each time.”
Davis was a force on the field, but spread the credit around to her teammates.
“There were some really good passes to me which I think were beneficial to help get the tries going,” she said.
Despite the victory, Albrecht said there are still lots of things to work on in practice this week.
“We’ve got our game plan, we’ve just got to go out and execute it,” he said. “If we execute our game plan, we’re fine. The biggest problem is making sure we’ve got enough girls.”
And they’ll look to put that training to good use on Saturday at 2 p.m. when SARFC hosts Crude/West out of Leduc.
“It’s going to a good battle,” she said. “We just need to be ready.”
