Ellerslie Rugby Park – There was a bright side to the division two women’s rugby team falling short of winning the Jo Reinbold Cup.
“I’m really happy with the result today even though we lost. With the performance we gave, everyone left everything out on the field,” said forward Isabella Bachynsky after the St. Albert Rugby Football Club dropped the 49-29 playoff decision to the Clan.
One of the positives was SARFC out-scoring the defending champions four tries to two in the last 40 minutes after trailing 39-7 at halftime.
“That’s what I love about our team; no matter where we start we always finish hard, which is really great,” Bachynsky said. “The first half there was a little bit of getting our heads on, we were a little bit nervous, but it was amazing to see us come back and it was amazing to see no one gave up on themselves. There was no negativity throughout the team at all.”
The Edmonton Rugby Union final was a done deal after the Clan torpedoed the SARFC with five tries and two conversions in the opening 20 minutes.
“We just didn’t come out playing our game,” said inside-centre Brandy Hanson. “Our best performance was our semifinal (32-10 against the LA Crude) and our plan was to build on that and for whatever reason we were gun shy, but we fought back and we started playing our systems and started playing to our strengths, and didn’t shy away. As soon as we got ball possession we built our confidence, but in the beginning few minutes we didn’t have the ball to get our confidence up.”
It was 29-0 when Bachynsky reached the try area in the 24th minute after Eleena Monk came close to scoring by busting through the defensive line off a penalty from the five-metre line. Jill Mitchell kicked the conversion.
“It was kind of an awkward play. The ball was actually supposed to go out to our backs, but I was in the way so I actually intercepted it from our 10 (Kiera Arndt). I saw a little gap so I just dove in. I got in on my side a little bit, but I saw the touch line and I placed it down, and then waited for the whistle,” Bachynsky said of her first try of the season.
SARFC closed out the first half with Monk, a prop, in the sin bin with her second yellow card in as many matches.
Throwing in the towel at halftime wasn’t an option for SARFC.
“We just don’t quit,” Hanson said. “Sometimes we do come out flat, but we never get down on each other on the field. We know that we can play better than we’re currently playing so we just build on that.”
Three minutes into the second half, gritty teamwork, a couple of quick balls and a simple finish by Kennedy Palmer to the corner of the try area gave SARFC something to rally around.
Down 49-12 with under 25 minutes to play, Keely Mazzolini-Flynn, a high-octane winger, sparked the SARFC attack with blazing speed coming off the bench for the rest of the tries, one on the left side and a pair on the right side, and Emily Dewitt added a conversion.
The Clan had lost a player to a yellow card prior to the first try by Mazzolini-Flynn.
Dewitt, a second half sub, and Brie Gray, who gave the Clan fits with her aggressive running and tackling, were among a handful of premier players like Mazzolini-Flynn who contributed to the team’s playoff run spearheaded by the determined division two mainstays.
“We’re a solid div two team. We’ve been proving it throughout the whole season. Our first (home) game we almost got shutout (by the Nor’Westers 48-5) so to be able to see us come to the city final and put up a really strong fight against such a premier dominated team, it’s really amazing,” Bachynsky said.
The Clan finished 8-5 after starting off 1-4 in round one of the ERU fixtures and the team’s 6-1 record in round two resulted in a berth in the final.
In previous matches between the two finalists, SARFC won 46-21 in round one June 12 and it was 39-22 for the Clan in round two Aug. 24.
SARFC’s 8-6 record included a second-place 5-2 mark in round two after going 2-3 in round one and the longest winning streak was three in a row to kick off the round two fixtures.
The semifinal victory against the third-place Crude, 6-6 overall, was also extra special after last year’s 31-0 loss in nasty weather conditions as SARFC, 8-2 in 2018, had only 13 players (two short of a full 15 lineup) available for the match.
“The season has been amazing. It started off kind of rocky, but it’s been a lot of development. Our coach (George Harding), it’s only his second year coaching us, so to have our team develop so much in such a short amount of time is really amazing. We also had a bunch of girls from premier step in and help us kind of build as a team. We got lot of training in so to see us kind of evolve throughout the whole season was really amazing,” said Bachynsky, 21, a high school rugby product of the Paul Bane Blues.
The first final for the SARFC women since the 2014 division two ERU and Rugby Alberta championship team was “huge, absolutely huge,” according to Hanson.
"We're not done. We have next season,” said the 2018 recipient of the Player’s Player Award for the division two women and the Mike Moss Memorial Cup as the SARFC Junior Rugby Coach of the Year.
“It’s amazing to have girls that are 19 years old to 53 years old and somehow on the field we gel as a team, and throughout the season we just kept building as a team, which is important, and we’re going to build on this for next season,” added Hanson, 35, an alumna of the Paul Kane rugby program.
