Sacramento State defeated Stanford 21-17 to win the Pacific Western Rugby Conference Men's College 7s Saturday, going 4-0 on the day.

Led by an MVP performance by Arnold June Walker, Sac State got big performances from Amir Frazier, Vincent Pace, Kellan Fisch,  and Miles Brown. The Hornets accomplished this victory despite missing Cutler Pons and Josh Reyes due to injuries.

Sac State played in the first West Coast 7s in San Luis Obispo. Being dropped to the 2nd tier, the team opted to take two squads to that tournament, and then one squad played in the WC 7s on Treasure Island. All of those games, said Head Coach Steve Seifert, served to provide valuable lessons to the players.

"We lost to UCLA and I told the guys this shows us what we need to work on," said Seifert, who prepared his Hornets squad but was unable to attend the tournament his past weekend. "We have a good squad of players—guys who have come from CK McClatchy and Peninsula Green, but we also got some guys who were playing football, and we started to play together."

It was all about structure.

"You don't want to be locked into structure," said Seifert. "But sometimes things go wrong in a rugby game; so when you need to reset, you rely on your structure to just settle it down and go again. We wanted to play without pressure. We knew that winning would qualify us for USA Rugby Nationals, but we didn't want that pressure on the players. We just said, winning would be nice, but if we don't and things don't go our way, we want to keep putting in good performances."

They needn't have been concerned.

Sac State defeated San Francisco State 21-7, Chico State 38-0, and Fresno State 29-14 in pool play. Meanwhile, Stanford beat San Jose State and Cal State Monterey Bay, and tied Nevada to go 2-0-1 in Pool A. That set up the final, where Sac State won.

This qualifies the Hornets to the USA Rugby DIAA 7s Nationals in the spring.

You can see footage of the entire tournament here: