The University of San Diego’s CRAA D1AA championship was not without hiccups, but in the end it was brilliantly finished.
Having graduated a small number of players who were nonetheless hugely influential—former No. 8 Michael Ramos could well have been the best D1AA player in the country—the Toreros were also dealing with a slight change in their season, with a smaller California South D1AA Conference.
“Yes our conference is small but there’s something to be said for that,” said USD Director of Rugby Kevin Eaton. “There are other conferences that are small that do well. We’ve played in a conference that’s been historically larger, but even then we had some scorelines that weren’t reflective of competitive games.”
The three-team conference of USD, Arizona State, and Claremont Colleges was a conference of three teams that knew what they were doing. Everyone played home-and-home and every game, said Eaton, was a challenge.
“We were down at halftime in both games against ASU and down at halftime against Claremont We are a very fitness-based team and so we tended to run away from teams late. Still they were very competitive games,” said Eaton.
The small conference schedule allowed USD to find challenges elsewhere, including D1A teams such as Arizona, San Diego State, and UCLA.
“What that helped us do was hold ourselves to a standard of play,” said Eaton. “We’re still kind of a young team. We graduated three or four guys from our starting lineup, and Michael Ramos was probably the best player we’ve ever had. But all we asked is if instead of Michael making big run after big run, our forwards all do one or two of those kinds of runs, and pick up their game a little bit, we could handle it. We have depth. We’ve got 62 players. And the young players stepped up; everyone knew their role.”
And yes the young players made an impact. Several of them came into USD with high-level HS experience. Eaton said they used the COVID shutdown to rethink how the program relates to alumni and especially to recruiting. USD is a Catholic University, so the connection to the Catholic school players in California was an obvious one. Starting loosehead Tanner Barnes is a freshman just recently out of Jesuit Sacramento. Sophomore flanker Sam Carlson is out of De La Salle. Sophomore tighthead Torres Kapust is also a DLS Spartan. Daniel Suhr, not from a Catholic school, is a nifty sophomore talent from Eastside Tsunami in Oregon, and was MVP of the D1AA final.
