Trainings are hard to get to as they begin at 530 and I work until 5, but am an hour away from Eugene. By the time I get changed and fight the Corvallis rush hour traffic (There is quite a bit of traffic leading out of t the town at 5pm) I don’t get to the pitch until 615. Then I have to throw my boots on and get in a quick warm up and stretch. It’s about 630 before I get into the action. I usually miss conditioning, which I really need, but at least get some good team work in.
I wasn’t really sure where I was going to play or how much I was going to play on Saturday’s game. Since it was a friendly match against the Oregon Sports Union (ORSU) B side, there was going to be a lot of rotation to get everyone a good amount of playing time. I started off as loose head prop and played all of the first half and was probably only out for 15 minutes of the 2nd half in order to give a fair amount of playing time. I loved wearing Numero Uno again! As much as I like playing other positions, I’ll always be a Numero Uno at heart.
It was an interesting match. I was out of shape…as I anticipated, so I didn’t get to the breakdowns as quickly as I once had. Due to the broken rib and the MS, I haven’t truly played since fall 2008 and I was in pretty good shape then. I consider that to be the level of rugby I would like to get back to and beyond.
I don’t tend to do well in chaos. (I’ll refrain from using the crass terminology I tend to use on the pitch when referring to chaos.) I get frustrated easily by people not being in position/in my way. With so many new people to rugby, I found this to be the case. There were people coming in from the side on the ruck and others milling out around the ruck instead of getting into position. Having just met these girls, I didn’t feel comfortable yelling at them to get into position, as I didn’t want to come to a team and start bossing them around….I later got over that.
During the chaos of switching people in and out, mostly newbies, the lineouts fell apart. I remember one specific lineout where I was the only one in the line. Not only could I not lift someone by myself, but there was no one to lift. I just yelled at the people milling about to figure out if they were supposed to be in a lineout or not. By the time they figured out what was going on, ORSU had thrown the ball in, and I was chasing them down. It was very frustrating.
The scrums are another terrible story. With the inexperience all around, it was hard to get low. Sometimes I couldn’t get low either because the hooker was standing straight up and I was off a bit or the 2nd row was too high and I kept trying to sit down on them to get them lower. When I finally got low, I kept screwing up by going up to high on engage. (Sorry for non-rugby friends who have no clue what I am talking about.) I was getting REALLY annoyed with the ORSU tight head as she was NOT binding. When that happens, I usually don’t have a place to put my shoulders which makes the scrum unstable and could possibly collapse. Things I would like to work on in practice: Getting set quickly so we are ready to hit on engage, getting low and staying low and getting tight in the scrum.
My favorite bad scrum incident was when I was low and ready to go, but instead of saying, “crouch, touch, hold, engage” the sir said, “crouch, touch, hold, break up.” Well the tight head prop must have mistaken it for a call to engage and her shoulder went right into my head, which really jarred my head. THEN the sir had the audacity to say it was my fault for not being low. It didn’t matter since we were technically not scrumming down and I had broken away from the scrum to reset. I was in pain and yelled at the sir for his mistake. My neck still hurts.
I had my fair share of awful playing. Lack of fitness was my number one issue. Then followed closely with my poor tackling. (Goals for this season) Coach Susan was happy with my play, I of course was not since I am my biggest critic. I know exactly what I do wrong, but because I have learned such bad habits, I can’t break them. I am hopeful that playing for a new team will help me with this.
I shouldn’t complain, we won and there were flashes of brilliance. The newbie Mesa totally took out ORSU’s best player with a brilliant tackle. As I am an awful tackler and was very proud of her for getting low and taking her down.
I have a lot of personal responsibility to exhibit if I want to be at the same level of leadership as I was in Dayton. That includes more than just doing conditioning on my own. I need to be more vocal and not worry about if I have room to speak about certain things. I may have only been with the team for a week, but I’ve been playing rugby for 8 years. Also, being under the guidance of Coach Borg and playing with those who have played higher level of rugby gives me room to talk.
No comments:
Post a Comment