The Carleton Ravens rugby team took home their first pre-season victory against the York University Lions on Sept. 1, winning 22-12.
The team has a number of new players this year and going into the game, head coach Denis Blondin said.
“We were a little nervous and we weren’t sure how they would adjust to the speed of the game,” Blondin said. “But they did a really good job integrating themselves.”
Blondin said the team approached the game aiming to utilize structures learned at earlier practices.
“The purpose of this game was really to get the players working together on our structures,” Blondin said. “We knew that some of the skills would fall to the side a bit through the game but once they got a little more adjusted to using the structures, the skills came back.”
Kaitlyn McLeod scored the first try of the match for the Ravens, continuing a scoring trend from last season as the team scored the first try for the majority of their games.
“We had issues last year with scoring early and not closing up games, but this year we’re trying to push that a lot more,” Blondin said.
The Ravens applied pressure while on the attack and brought home two more tries and a penalty goal, creating a scoring gap and overcoming the York Lions by the end of the game.
Power forward Ingrid Krausbar said the team was “really satisfied” with the result of the first match.
“Our main goal today was to work on our setups,” Krausbar said. “We just really wanted to make sure all the plays went well.”
Despite having a number of fresh faces on the team this year, Krausbar said everyone is “meshing really well.”
“It’s always really hard with so many new people, but the older girls who have more experience are really helping the younger girls who have less experience playing at a higher level,” Krausbar said.
Blondin said the rest of the pre-season exhibition games would give the team a chance to work out some of the kinks.
“Our two exhibition games will really just be a matter of us cleaning up our structure, making sure we’re get on the same page in terms of our communication so everyone’s going in the same direction,” Blondin said.
Even with a win under their belt, Blondin said it’s still early to predict how the rest of the season will unfold for the Ravens, but they will continue to focus on team goals.
“One [goal] was to really focus on structure and attack, the other was to make sure we put a lot of pressure on attack and defence and create a lot of turnovers, which we were able to do,” Blondin said. “The last part was just to make sure that we started building more of a winning mindset.”
The Ravens will begin their regular season in Montreal, facing off with the Concordia Stingers on Sept. 8.
