Last year’s CRAA Women’s D1 Fall Final saw Navy edge Davenport 20-12, but it’s possible that total of 32 points could be bypassed in the first 40 minutes.
Navy is back and faces a largely unknown and very dangerous Utah State team. Yes Navy has an excellent defense, but they can also score—boy can they score—and USU can score, too.
“We feel pretty good,” said Navy Head Coach “We have been getting better almost every week this season and we came out and played our best match in the semi final against a strong Northeastern squad.”
That would be the 52-5 defeat of the Huskies to make this final, a game in which Marissa Meyer continued her scoring run with two tries, and in which Eliza Herring added two plus a conversion.
That followed on from Navy’s tense 12-3 win over Air Force in the first round. A difficult game in Colorado Springs, to be sure, but one in which they were patient and battled through. With Meyer, Herring, Nicole Deprey, and Megan Leitz, Navy has a potent attack and is playing well as a unit despite several changes within the team.
McCarthy says it’s likely that 14 of the 23 on the gameday roster for Saturday didn’t play in the final a year ago.
“So that makes the team pretty different right out of the gate,” said the coach. “But we have a nice combination of experience guiding a youth movement. We do pride ourselves in how we defend for sure but I think the rugby IQ has gone up significantly in the last few weeks and we are not afraid to put thy foot on the ball if the situation warrants it and that has been an improvement from the past.”
So what will they face? Utah State is an athletic team made up mostly (and somewhat surprisingly) of players who had not played rugby before college. But, said captain Alia Stubbs, “we have a large number of girls who are just really adaptable to the game. A lot come from a soccer background and we just put them in a spot and tell them ‘this is what you have to do’ and they do it.”
The Aggies found that they perform best in a freewheeling style.
“For us a team we don’t play a structured game,” she said. “We are very free-flowing; when we are given set things to do it doesn’t work well.”
It’s risky, she said; a lot of times things backfire. But this is a very athletic and athletically intelligent team that can handle the ups and downs of a freewheeling game.
