Girls Nationals are coming this weekend so let's take another look at the rankings shall we?
We have a few changes based on some results, plus there remains a maddening inability for some teams and leagues to actually report results—it's Tuesday and they won't say what happened Saturday? Why not?
Anyway, a couple of notes. We had it wrong in Oregon and should have had Summit in there not Valley. That's been fixed. Flathead Valley did indeed lose to the last-placed team in Montana, but since FV had #1 sewn up we're inclined to believe they selected a different lineup for that game and thus we don't hit them too hard. Downingtown beat a higher-ranked team (Moon Area) in the RugbyPA playoffs so that's an easy move.
We should have had St. Thomas Aquinas in the rankings due to their success from the fall. That's been fixed. Perry comes in on the basis of some solid results.
The HS Nationals have combined into one event, a club bracket and a single-school bracket. In recent years those two brackets have been held in different places. So it's good to see it all converge on Cottage Grove in Wisconsin.
There's a Tier 1 Club which includes #11 Majestics, #2 Aspetuck, and #6 SacPAL in Pool A, and #14 Morris, #28 United, and #16 Belmont Shore in Pool B. Yes our rankings seem to indicated Pool A is stronger, but there's partly due to which teams play more 7s than 15s. We'll see how it all shakes out.
The Tier 2 Club includes SPASH, Chicago, #13 Wolverines, and #23 Clayton/Raleigh.
The Single-School D1 is a straight bracket format with our #1, DSHA, the #1 seed against Grandville (unranked but could be ranked ... 3rd in Michigan in the fall), #2 seed Eagle (we ranked #4 but 2nd among school teams) vs DSHA's JV, #3 seed Columbia Central (ranked #8) vs Warsaw (not ranked), and finally #4 seed Catholic Memorial (#10 ranked) vs Meridien (not ranked).
There's a Tier 2 with Hamilton, City Honors, Taft, none of which are ranked by GRR, and three JV teams.
So a lot of ranked-vs-ranked teams and some nice direct comparisons to make.
These rankings are brought to you by Next Phase Rugby, an app that links HS rugby players with college rugby programs. Set up your player profile here:
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