Top Teams Flood Great Northwest Challenge

The only major HS all-star tournament West of the Continental Divide kicks off this weekend in Corvallis, Ore, with a massive feast of rugby at the Great Northwest Challenge.

And the tournament is also an interesting experiment to see how splitting off of all-star efforts from their State-Based Rugby Organizations works.

In Northern California, select side efforts have divided on geographic grounds, which makes sense for anyone who has tried to just zip down to the Bay Area from Sacramento without going crazy over traffic (hint, it can’t be done). Do there’s a Bay Area team, and there’s a Sac Valley team. The talent pool is very strong for both teams to do well.

The Rhino Rugby Academy operated independently of either Rugby NorCal or SoCal Youth Rugby, and has satellites in both regions. They have drawn players from both regions. The SoCal team already saw some players initially selected to the Griffins go with EIRA SoCal or Rhino, so their roster was in flux as a result.

The upshot? More players are from talent-rich areas are exposed to high-level play. Could it be that the tournament is diluted? Possibly, but many observers think we’re not at that point yet.

Defending champions Rugby Oregon has one team in Boys Varsity, as does Rugby Idaho (a Western Idaho team, as the Eastern Idaho group went to Utah. 

Washington split off, with the official Rugby Washington Loggers team coached by Steve Brennan, but there’s also a Washington Wolverines team coached by Chris Nickel. There’s no geographic division with this team, but there’s not really any animosity, either. The split is mostly philosophical. The Loggers train a lot together, and have a specific pattern of play. The Wolverines takes players who didn’t want to, or couldn’t, devote the time required for the Loggers program. And they took players who just didn’t fit.

As a result, the Loggers are a rugby-experienced, structured team, while the Wolverines are athletic, maybe not quite as rugby experienced, but very much a wild card. Harnessed correctly the Wolverines (as is true of the animal) would do a lot of damage. They almost won the GNC (which didn’t have the Loggers in it) in 2015.

Montana is another wild card. They just finished their league season so didn’t have a lot of time. But Montana keeps coming back to the GNC, and the players are getting better as a result. The Montana teams also draw from Eastern Washington, and have a few players from Spokane, Wash. just to shake things up.

This is a very competitive group. The Loggers have traditionally done well because they have good on-field leadership and unit - and the best front row in the tournament - but Oregon has had some excellent leadership and coaching from Troy Hall. The split in Northern California is going to be a good thing - sort of similar to what happened in Indiana. The top clubs from those areas - Danville in the Bay Area and Granite Bay in Sacramento - have contributed their coaches to run the teams, and they will have player belief - and talent - in spades. If they can play together, you might see an all-NorCal final.

In the JV bracket the Washington Loggers has a long tradition of winning at this level, but that's partly because the program took JV-level select-side rugby seriously before anyone else did. They will have their hands full, especially against Sac Valley.

(A note on the SoCal rosters - we have removed players who are listed on other rosters, that we can see - but this roster we list may not be the final list as it was taken from the original announcement made some weeks ago.)