Edina and Minnetonka will meet in the final of the Minnesota Youth Rugby Boys HS championship next week after both won semifinals Saturday.

For Edina, the favorite and defending champs, it was a scary day. Edina ran out to a 12-0 lead, but were stifled by a strong Duluth forward pack and the game ended 12-12.

Edina Head Coach Mark Dalton said he felt his team eased up a little and didn’t contest for possession enough. As a result, Duluth was able to work the phases and control the pace of the game, as well as keep the ball away from Edina’s dangerous backline.

In overtime, Edina put Duluth under some pressure, and got a penalty. Nick Bloom tapped quickly and went over for the game-winner.

Dalton said Bloom and flyhalf Will Hoff were “massive.”

Meanwhile, Minnetonka played Eagan, a team that had beaten Minnetonka 44-20 on April 15.

But Coach Peter Heussler said that game had been his Minnetonka team’s first run-out, while Eagan already had played a couple of games.

Certainly Minnetonka had some work to do to nail down their game plan and approach.

“Our preseason we stress basic skills,” said Heussler. “We have a lot of good athletes, but they weren’t experienced in rugby. So they had to learn. Slowly we built our pattern, and the players started to see what worked best for them.”

Coming into the semis, Minnetonka was on a roll, winning their last four games by an average score of 90-1 (no, seriously, that was the average). Eagan was unbeaten, too, but not by such dominant scores.

Sometimes that means a team is getting it easy. But Heussler said the approach was never to score lots of tries, but to execute the game plan.

It didn’t start so well for Minnetonka on Saturday, as Eagan scored two quick tries to lead 10-0. But Eagan is young and got a little impatient. They gave up the ball and Minnetonka punished them, got on the front foot, and seven tries later, led 41-10.

Eagan got one back, but the game ended 41-17 for Minnetonka.

“We learned a lot from that first loss to Eagan and also our loss to Thomas Aquinas,” said Heussler. “We just started to play the way we can.”

The halfback combination of Beau Bakken and Sam Johnson was superb for Minnetonka, with Johnson’s kicking from the hand a big factor in pinning Eagan back in their 22. Up front, tighthead prop James Van Horne was their main ground-gainer in tight.

So now a shaken but unbeaten Edina takes on a Minnetonka team that is just thundering along.

“We feel pretty good,” said Heussler. “We’ve been there before, in the final against Edina. They are really good. They counter-ruck really well and are one of the few teams that can kick back to us. It will be a great game.”

In other brackets, Southside beat STMA and North Suburban beat South River in the Plate semis. 

In the Bowl Semis, Faribault beat St. Cloud 32-17, while Hopkins shut out Western Warriors 45-0.

Then later in the day, Southside beat North Suburban 14-7 to take the Plate. South River beat STMA 29-26 to take 7th. Hopkins won the Bowl 27-14 over Faribault, while the Western Warriors won 11th by forfeit.

So next week it’s just two games, with Edina v Minnetonka for the cup, and Duluth v Eagan for 3rd.