Rugby women reach final

With the season on the line the women's team at the St. Albert Rugby Football Club refused to lose Saturday's playoff against the Strathcona Druids.

The resounding 37-17 victory in Sherwood Park also guaranteed SARFC its first crack at an Edmonton Rugby Union championship since 2009.

“We went in with a lot of confidence,” said second row Jasmine Fleming, who also serves as SARFC's director of senior rugby. “We knew if we lost it was our last game until next May so we went in with a totally different mindset. Everyone was vibrating going into the game and as soon as it was over it was madness. Everyone jumped on each other. People were almost like crying. Everyone was so happy.”

Head coach Byron Elliott credited the players' unwavering will to win as the deciding factor in beating the Druids on their home pitch.

“They played with every ounce of energy they had,” said Elliott, noting the semifinal consisted of two halfs instead of four quarters of rolling substitutions in league play. “They got tired but they just dug deep. They were crawling off that field at the end of it, absolutely crawling. The effort that they exerted was amazing.”

SARFC will ruck and maul the Grande Prairie Sirens for the ERU second division crown and a berth at the Alberta Rugby Union final Aug. 23 at the Calgary Rugby Club. The feature match in Saturday's rugby tripleheader at Grande Prairie kicks off at 4 p.m. but SARFC is hoping it will be moved to Ellerslie Rugby Park where historically all ERU championships — men, women and juniors — are staged.

The Sirens, Druids and SARFC finished in a three-way deadlock for top spot in the five-team ERU table at 3-1 but the Sirens were slotted first with five bonus points, compared to four for the Druids and three for SARFC.

In the combined ERU spring league and division two standings SARFC is 9-4 and the Sirens are 7-6.

In the spring league fixtures, four teams were promoted into Alberta division one and the rest of the teams were grouped together in the second division.

SARFC wielded the upper hand against the Sirens in wins of 47-22 at Alpine field in the spring league and 31-30 at Grande Prairie in the second division.

The Sirens reached the final after the Rockers (1-3 and 2-11 overall) forfeited their semifinal trip to Grande Prairie.

“Grande Prairie is a huge team. They're very, very physical. All of their players are very good, very big but we've shown twice that we have what it takes to beat them so we're pretty confident going into that game,” Fleming said.

It's a major milestone for a SARFC women's program on the verge of disbandment in the offseason after some incredibly porous seasons of bloated losses and a shrinking talent pool.

The last hurrah for SARFC's ladies of the pitch was five years ago, when the second division Blues finished 13-1 as the triple-crown winners of the ERU pennant and playoff cup and ARU championship.

“It's just a great turnaround. Byron and (assistant coach) Ashley Hanson have done so much with our team,” Fleming said. “We would've loved to play first division rugby but now that we're seeing how successful we are in second division rugby, going into the city final is something we can build off even more next year to get more girls coming in.”

SARFC put itself in position to celebrate a championship with its greatest all-around team performance of the year.

“They peaked at the right time. Everything clicked. The offloading game was unbelievable, the support play was unbelievable, the rucking they went for it at full force and the scrummaging we dominated all day,” Elliott said.

The last confrontation against the Druids was the 42-14 loss in Sherwood Park in the second-last match before the playoffs. It was a disappointing showing after SARFC knocked off the host Druids 12-10 in a heavy downpour May 28.

“The difference (from the loss) was we just bought into our systems we've been working on throughout the season and it just clicked,” Elliott said. “It's one of those things that you can't really explain but it comes down to the players. I've been asking them to attack out a little bit wider and they did and defensively when they were attacking we put pressure on (the Druids) and they coughed the ball up.

“We also had a couple of positional swaps and they seemed to work.”

SARFC never trailed to lead by 15 at halftime and surrendered only one try in the second half.

“We pressured them from the get-go,” Elliott said. “When we had the ball obviously they're going backwards, which gives our backs a bit more space to work with.”

Sabrina Kelly scored two pivotal tries and captain Katie Davis kicked the stuffing out of the ball.

“It was a really hard fought game,” said Fleming, 27. “We had a lot of the ball within our forwards and that was pretty effective for us. Our offloading game was really on so that kept them on the back foot throughout the whole game and we really capitalized on that.”