D1A’s winter/spring season starts off strong with some intriguing matchups, and that includes Saint Mary’s visiting Grand Canyon University on Saturday.
Both teams were pretty busy in the fall, with GCU playing a couple of warmup 15s games and participating in two of the West Coast 7s tournaments.
They played three major 15s games, beating Colorado and also University of San Diego, while losing to a very strong Colorado State side 54-28.
“We had a good development season in the Fall which really helped our younger players get valuable reps,” Had Coach Sean O’Leary told GRR. “Now, with a number of seniors returning, we’re really looking forward to the upcoming season.”
Still O’Leary will be relying on some young players to make an impact—they had a pretty robust recruiting year and their sophomores are pretty strong, too—60% of the roster is in their first two years at the school.
They have, however, welcomed a couple of transfer students who will bring a little more experience. “The players have worked hard and I’m looking forward to seeing them preform on Saturday,” enthused O’Leary.
Saint Mary’s, meanwhile, has a long conference schedule to get through and they tend to front-load that. Part of the reason for that is, to be blunt, they are heavily favored in many of those games. So the Gaels can play those games when they are a little undercooked, sometimes splitting their squad to play someone else (or two league games in one day). This year they took on UCSC, Long Beach State, Santa Clara, and UCSB, all conference opponents, and won all of those games fairly handily.
The closest was against Long Beach State, and that result was 53-3.
