GRR: Wayne State
It has been a few years of battling for Wayne State to get their D3/Small College NCR title.
Three straight years of heartbreak had to hurt.
The roots of NCR are in the small colleges, and it’s there that the entity-previously-known-as-NSCRO set out its shingle.
And while we at GRR end up talking a lot more about the D1, D1AA, and D2 brackets, for NCR really it’s D3 (what used to be Small Colleges) that made the organization.
A last minute try from Charlie Price pulled victory from the jaws of defeat to secure Babson the 2023 National Collegiate Rugby Small-College championship over a determined Wayne State.
A sunny and very windy day welcomed the finalists and Babson played with the wind and quite the wind it was.
In fact the breeze gave and it took away. More on that in a moment.
Wayne State College mounted a stirring, wind-aided comeback to overhaul a 15-0 deficit and defeat defending small-college champs Cal Poly Humboldt Friday in the NCR Men’s Small College semis.
Going into the NCR Small-College season, many felt that Cal Poly Humboldt and Babson had a serious shot to make it to the final.
Even the (mostly) trained monkeys working in the offices of GRR World Headquarters thought so. CPH had, of course, won it all last year, while Babson had emerged as Small-College 7s champs, so it seemed logical.