Atlantis Rugby has branched out into 15s and recently taken part at the Rugby Ohio Buckeye Invitational! The event featured teams from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina, along with our team which was a mix of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
We were drawn into a pool with the Pittsburgh Harlequins and Ohio Aviators White. The opposite pool included Celtic (from Ohio), North Carolina, and Aviators Red. We split our pool play matches with a 28-0 win over Pittsburgh and a close 16-14 loss to the Aviators.
These results on day 1 sent us to the semifinals for matchup against Celtic and the boys put forth a really strong performance to earn a 29-0 victory and setup a rematch with Aviators White. Unfortunately, we couldn’t quite get over the hump with another close loss by the score of 17-12 to take second place.
Afterwards Coach Connor Hohman made mention of the fact that the boys played tremendous rugby all weekend and just couldn’t get the ball to bounce our way against Aviators while Director Foley sent a message to the team praising them for establishing such a strong culture and set of norms that will be followed for every team going forward. In the words of the Director “We will build on this, and grow from it as all communities do, but it will all stem from what happened this weekend.”
It is an exciting time to be part of Atlantis Rugby with developmental opportunities popping up in both 7s and 15s and this initial squad should take a lot of pride in how they carried themselves and established this facet of the program.
The coaches also made mention of PJ Degnan and Kyran Rautenbach for the work they did captaining the side. Their leadership was invaluable. We would also like to give a shout out to Phil Olivo for handling the veo camera over the weekend so that the players could review the film – thanks Phil!
The change in format from 7s to 15s, and the larger roster, provided opportunities for a number of new players to join Atlantis Rugby including: Anthony Ayre, Luke Huber, Jameson King, Damian Mager, Chris Pecora, Alec Sprouse, Andrew Volberg, and Chris Whitcomb who were assigned players numbers 1914-1921.
The full roster for the event, with Atlantis Player numbers in parenthesis, included:
Anthony Ayre (1914)
Marco Burns (1676)
Roman Cammarata (1751)
PJ Degnan (1618)
Danny Francis (1881)
Dylan George (1882)
Luke Huber (1915)
Justin Kaplan (1816)
Jerry Karcewski (1621)
Jameson King (1916)
Damian Mager (1917)
Jack Olivo (1891)
Chris Pecora (1918)
Dominick Pecora (1902)
Kyran Rautenbach (1624)
Christian Rebimbas (1884)
Isaac Russell (1885)
Brett Sparks (1819)
Alec Sprouse (1919)
Andrew Volberg (1920)
Chris Whitcomb (1921)
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