Davenport University and Army are acquainted, as the two teams met in the DIA playoffs last year; and this year a place in the semifinals is at stake between the two teams.

Last year was a strange matchup, as Army was an at-large choice just coming off suspension facing a team that hadn’t won a conference game. Davenport ended up winning on a late try, and this year’s host, West Point, is a team eager to get some measure of revenge.

As prop David Evans said in his player blog this week, Army has used its bye week to work on Coach Mike Mahan’s “favorite rugby skill - conditioning.” Mahan makes no apology.

“We’ve been working pretty consistently on conditioning throughout the spring,” Mahan told Goff Rugby Report. “Since we’re varsity now we have the advantage of some professionally-led strength development in the morning, and that’s really helped.”

Mahan remembers Army losing late against Davenport last year and doesn’t want to see that happened again. Army has generally hung on until the grim end in games, winning several close games along the way. But they also lost intensity and focus in losses to Life and St. Mary’s. They don’t want to do that against the Panthers.

“If we tackle, we will win,” said Mahan, simply. “They are a determined group, and our fitness we expect to be better than theirs, so we will want to keep the ball moving in the forwards and not let the game slow down. Out wide, we’re good, and so are they, so we’ll see how it goes.”

Back from shoulder surgery is fullback Logan Pearce, the team’s vice captain. His addition is a big boost to a team that doesn’t have a lot of veterans.

They will take on a Davenport team that showed plenty of veteran leadership last week in their win over Wheeling Jesuit. 

“We were guilty of trying to do too much in one play,” said Head Coach James Wood. “When you score early on sometimes a team thinks it’s going to go that way the whole game, and it didn’t. We needed to be more intelligent and more focussed.”

In the locker room at halftime, flyhalf JP Eloff started to speak, and as Eloff’s harsh assessment of the Davenport team’s performance checked off all of Wood’s bullet points on his clipboard, the coach just let him talk.

“We are trying to develop more intelligent rugby players who take ownership of their decisions,” said Wood. “So I stepped back and said to myself, let’ them run with this and address it. They knew what was going on.”

Davenport turned a 14-8 halftime score into a 38-8 rout, and earned a trip to West Point and what promises to be a dramatic, and close, DIA quarterfinal.