Following a tough loss on the road against conference rival Norwich, the Army women’s rugby team will travel to Annapolis, Md., to take on Navy in a Saturday morning meeting between the service academy rivals.

Army fell in its prior outing at Norwich, 51-21 but played a much better game than their first meeting with the Cadets. Despite having a shortened week of practice, the Black Knights have been focusing on brining physical play to Saturday’s game.  

“We just worked on ball placement and physicality,” said head coach Bill LeClerc. “I think that was one of the reasons why we struggled against Norwich. They’re a very physical team and we got close and crawled our way back into the game with 20 odd minutes to go and they stepped up the physicality and we couldn’t quite match it, so our big focus has been contact and physicality and just doing the simple things a lot better and with a lot more accuracy and a lot more physicality and then hopefully that will stem on to a good performance not only against Navy but AIC and Air Force and then moving on.”

Army’s cadet-athletes will spend the weekend in Annapolis, Md., staying in the barracks with the Naval Academy cadets before the two teams compete on Saturday at 10 a.m.  

“I think they’re going to find out that they’re obviously very similar in the careers that they’ve chosen,” added LeClerc. “I think it’s an awesome experience that they can, while be heated rivals on the field, off the field they can then enjoy each other’s company and have a lot of mutual respect for each other.”

Following Saturday’s competition against Navy the Black Knights will head to American International for their final road contest of the regular season. They’ll close out the year with a home match against Air Force on Oct. 31.