As college rugby teams do a better job of attracting more athletic players to the game, creating varsity and quasi-varsity programs, and breaking away from the old club model, it’s worth noting when an old-school club team does well.

In his third year as coach of Boston College, Rob Conway led the Eagles to an impressive record in the fall of 2015, winning 9 and losing once, to top-ranked AIC. Along the way BC recorded three shutouts in league play, defeated Dartmouth and Alabama. They also beat UMass, which defeated ACRL #2 NC State in impressive fashion.

We checked in with Conway last week before we decided to make him Men’s DI College Top Coach of the Fall, and he was more excited about the ECRC performances at the ACRC Bowl Series, where AIC, UMass, and BC all won, beating the top two teams in the ACRL, and the #3 team in the SCRC.

“This is the second year in a row that UMass, AIC, and BC have gone down there and swept all our games,” said Conway. “The great thing is, we’re setting the bar a little bit higher, and not taking a step backwards. For us, we didn’t know Alabama and we didn’t know any of the teams they’d played. We knew they were going to be tough, and we knew it would be a war of attrition.”

“Whenever we can get the ball wide and in some space we can make things happen,” said center Danny Schatzman, who epitomizes the BC type of player in that he is brave and difficult to pin down, but isn’t big. “They defended well. They come up hard and are well organized, so we needed to make some adjustments.”

“We’re used to being one of the smaller teams out there,” added captain Ben Nathan. “It doesn’t both us.”

“We’re always the smaller team; it’s very rare for us to be bigger,” added Conway. “That’s why we work so much on our tackling efficiency and our fitness in the game, and on offense from Day One we have focused on basic handling skills, communication, and fitness. The hardest thing in all of sports is to pick yourself up off the ground in a rugby game. Our guys always do that well and it showed in the final ten minutes against Alabama. They were very tired, and our guys felt they could go another ten minutes.”

So for getting a team to punch above its weight, and win nine out of ten. For beating ranked teams Dartmouth (43-17), NEC (27-16), UMass (39-20), and Alabama (26-20), Boston College get’s kudos from Goff Rugby Report, and their coach, Rob Conway, is our top coach of the fall.