The Cal Poly club rugby team defeated the defending national champion and broke Cal’s 63-game winning streak as senior Matthew Varga completed a game-winning conversion on Saturday.
It was the biggest win to date for the team’s new head coach David Burnett, who previously coached rugby in Australia for 10 years and was hired by Cal Poly in October.
“It was a pretty crazy scene (after the win),” Burnett said. “A lot of cheering and people running onto the field, a lot of happy faces.”
According to Burnett, the match was an up and down affair with Cal Poly taking an early lead before Cal rallied in the second half. Although the Golden Bears didn’t play many of their star players until late in the match, Burnett said his side is relatively inexperienced as well. Andy Early, who tied the match as 20 apiece late in the match, started playing rugby 10 months ago.
Although the match was considered friendly, it was the first non-playoff match Cal lost to a college in the U.S. since Cal Poly defeated the team in 2004.
The team competes in the highest division of collegiate rugby in the nation, known as DI-A, but the sport is not yet part of the NCAA.
“It’s a very physical game with a lot of ball skills,” Burnett said. “It’s very fast paced — just imagine a continuous football game.”
The “sevens” team came in eighth place out of 24 qualifying teams in the first annual USA Sevens Rugby national championship held at Texas A&M in December. The team made it to the quarterfinals of the tournament before being defeated by Arkansas State, the eventual champions.
Rugby sevens became more popular in the U.S. when it was announced in 2009 that it will be introduced into the 2016 summer Olympics. As a result, last year was the first national championships for rugby sevens in the U.S.
Rugby sevens games only last 14 minutes. If players are taken off the field, they’re not allowed to be substituted back in. Every play is important in a game with such limited time and only seven players on each team, Burnett said.
Each player practices with the “15s” squad (the team that defeated Cal) for half of practice; then, the sevens team breaks off for the remainder of training.
“We executed our plan and made a few mistakes and just simply ran out of time,” said senior construction management and team captain David Schaefer. “We performed above the nation’s expectations but still fell short of the Cal Poly standard that we expect to play to.”
Dom Ferri, a starting player on the sevens team who usually plays a fullback position and is one of the fastest players on the team, separated his shoulder during the tournament and was unable to continue playing.
Landis Nasser, a player that hadn’t been given much time on the field previously, was able to take over Ferri’s spot.
“Fortunately for us, (Nasser) stepped in and probably played the best on the team that tournament,” Schaefer said. “Ferri is an important player, but him getting hurt allowed for (Nasser) to come in and really help the team. It’s a situation that could have been looked down on. Instead, it was an opportunity for someone who probably wouldn’t have spent as much time on the field to perform above and beyond anyone’s expectations.”
Nasser was recognized by the USA Rugby All-American selectors as one of the top 10 collegiate rugby sevens players in the nation.
“You never expect anything like that, but it felt good to be recognized,” Nasser said. “When I first found out that I got it, I felt dumbfounded, but the coaches reassured me that I earned it, and it felt good. The award is as much a team award as an independent award. Without a good group of players around me, there’s no way I would have done as well.”
“I’m most proud of the fact that we had such a short amount of time to prepare and were able to come together from an underdog position and do as well as we did in the nationals,” Nasser said.
Cal Poly’s men’s sevens rugby team only has an A- and B-team, whereas some of the big schools competing in the tournament such as Cal, St. Mary’s, Arkansas State and Life University have six teams, Burnett said.
This helped the team gained credibility on the national scale, Burnett said.
“It’s good for us to compete against the other top teams in the country,” he said. “It’s good to get acknowledgement on the grand scale. We lost in the last few minutes of the game to the eventual national champions.”
Nasser and Schaefer both said they like Burnett as a coach, and the time that he puts into filming the team has been beneficial.
“He’s brought the team together,” Nasser said. “I feel like he understands rugby and all its nuances. He’s committed a lot of time to film sessions. He’s just trying to make the players better and trying to make the team better.”
During their training for the championship they did conditioning at the Montana de Oro sand dunes in Los Osos in addition to team practices three nights a week for two hours a night. Players also do conditioning and weight programs on their own time.
“The biggest asset is our players are all very intelligent,” Burnett said. “To play good rugby you need to be quite intelligent. Players make all the decisions. There’s no down time like football. They’re making good decisions out there. We’re pretty strong across the board.”
Cal Poly hosts UC Santa Barbara to open the regular season on March 3 and will also play UC Davis in San Luis Obispo during Open House weekend on April 7.
J.J. Jenkins contributed to this report.