Lorne Akins School celebrated its 20th anniversary of Gator rugby as the repeat winners of the Greater Edmonton male and female 7’s championships.
The Gators were also awarded the aggregate trophy again for the most wins by a school in the recent junior high flag rugby tournament at Ellerslie Rugby Park.
“It’s such an honour to win it for your school,” said Telly Gurney, a Grade 9 Gator A guy. “It makes you feel like you’re more than just a student. You actually showed that you care for the school and you do that by representing your school with the team you’re on.”
It was also the prefect graduation gift for the Grade 9 rugby Gators.
“It was a really great way to end the year and to go out with a bang and win all of that rugby stuff in the sport that I really love,” said Emily Dewitt, who scored one try and dropped kicked two conversions for the Gator A gals in the 19-0 victory over the rival Hillcrest Mustangs in the final.
The 7’s flag rugby game is played on a full-length field and features three forwards and four backs. Matches are seven-minute halfs.
“I like 7’s because it’s faster and it doesn’t matter what position you play you still can run with the ball and get a try. In club rugby the forwards don’t really run, they just do the scrums and the backs run but in 7’s it’s way different. Everyone runs if they get the ball,” said Gurney, a U17 wing at the St. Albert Rugby Football Club.
Last year the Greater Edmonton league added the 7’s game to its 10’s co-ed flag format that was introduced in 2005.
“It’s a really fast-paced game. You’re always running and you always get lots of chances to get the ball and show what you can do,” said Dewitt, a Grade 9 standoff and third-year rugby Gator.
The tournament featured more than 20 schools and the Gators were represented by two male and two female 7’s teams.
The Gator A gals defeated D.S. MacKenzie and Florence Hallock in pool play and in the semifinals beat their Gator B sisters.
In the final, Chelsea Richardson capped off a move to the blind side with a nifty try in the opening minutes of the first half and Dewitt made the conversion.
In the second half Carly Umbach turned on the jets and motored down the left side for a smartly executed overlap try. Dewitt’s convert attempt rattled the goal post and landed unsuccessfully.
Dewitt, 14, closed out the scoring after hauling in a pass near the 22-metre line and converted her own try.
Sherri Graff, Sarah Weihmann, Dewitt’s twin sister, Kendall, and Dacia Lopez, filling in for injured scrum-half Sarah Passek, also contributed to the first win of the season against Hillcrest.
“We just played our game, worked as a team, stayed positive and did our best,” Dewitt said. “We didn’t charge in too far to get the flags, like overrun ourselves. We kind of stayed and waited for them to come to us and then challenged them.”
Dewitt noted the championship was on par with last year’s accomplishment.
“It’s about the same because we still beat the teams by quite a bit of points,” she said. “The other schools weren’t as strong as our team, mostly because of the coaches (Daneka Bischler and Teagan Barnes) we have.”
The Gator A guys posted wins over Dr. Donald Massey B, DS Mackenzie and Florence Hallock A and in the semifinals prevailed against the tenacious Elmer S. Gish Warriors.
In the 5-0 squeaker against Massey A in the final, Naiem Qadiri followed up a break by Matt Dejanovic and split two defenders to score the game-winning try in the second half.
Gurney, 15, preserved the hard-fought triumph by hunting down a Massey runner with an outstanding try-saving lunge to grab his flag only a few metres from the try line late in the match.
“I knew if I didn’t do that we might have lost the game,” said Gurney, a standout defensively and hooking. “It felt like such a relief because I just saved the team the win.”
An air-tight defence helped frustrate a strong attack en route to the team’s first win against Massey.
“We had to work really hard in the final to beat them,” Gurney said.
The Gators’ line-up included Cam Edwards, Mitchell Jacobs, Robert Leck, Wade Seville, Arjan Bashati and Ben Grabia.
Coaching the Gator guys were Bryan Alm, Matt Goertzen, Ian Scott, Graeme Scott and Dan Wiles.
Gurney said this year’s championship was extra special.
“It felt like we accomplished something because we had to work for it. Last year the teams didn’t know much about rugby compared to ours. It was just a different skill level because we were just more skilled than the other teams,” said the second-year rugby Gator. “This year it was a lot different. There were a lot of good teams that were fast and coordinated, just like ours. We actually lost one of our games but then we got our heads straight and we pulled it together.”
The general manager of Gator rugby is longtime Lorne Akins teacher, Roger Scott.
