Union HS moved to the top of Oregon’s single-school league with a convincing 43-0 defeat of previously 5-0 Oregon City.

With the victory Union improves to 5-0 and is now only potentially worried about Newberg. At 4-0, Newberg has some big games coming up, including Oregon City on Saturday, and a shortened round-robin game with Union in May.

Against Oregon City, Union started out a little rusty after Spring Break. 

“The boys were mentally just not sharp enough and were making basic errors,” said Coach David Curle. “Also Oregon City were pumped up for this game and really brought it.”

The need to defend their line against a furious Oregon City attack instilled a little more vigor in the Union play. Eventually they cleared their lines and took the lead on a penalty by Tyler Dionne. Then a nice individual effort on the wing by Caleb Browning led to a try, but that was it for the first half.

“At halftime the boys were able to flush the poor performance of the first half,” said Curle. “I encouraged the boys to get the forwards involved more and start asserting themselves.” 

It worked, and No. 8 Tate Nelson went over early. With the kicking game working Union began to dominate territory, and a nice solo effort from Brendon Curle plus two from center Chris Berry and another from Browning put the game to bed.

Rugby Oregon has regular-length games that count for four points for a win, two for a tie, and one for a loss of 7 or less. Every week three teams play in a round-robin of shorter games that count for half-points in the standings. Teams also get bonus points for putting putting club members through refereeing courses.

So that’s while Union’s 5-0 record gives them 18 points (two of the wins were round-robin wins, and two points for refs), and Oregon City’s 5-1 record gives them 14 points, because four of those wins were of the round-robin variety.

Meanwhile, Newberg is 4-0 with all of those games being regular-length. But they haven’t trained any refs yet and that could hurt them. Newberg has 16 points in the standings, and faces Oregon City followed by two round-robins, one being with Union.

Meanwhile in Oregon’s multi-school division, Beaverton beat the Clark County Warriors 47-12 while Eastside defeated one of their rivals in Linn Benton 34-27.

That was the closest game Eastside has had all season. Beaverton is now 6-0 for 20 points, and Eastside is 8-0 for 20 points.