Princeton headed to National Sevens Championship after Ivy title

The women’s rugby team will travel to North Carolina next weekend to play in the USA Rugby National Collegiate Sevens Championship tournament.

The team, which was 5-6 in the regular season and 2-3 in the regular fifteens season, won an automatic bid to the championship after beating Penn by a comfortable 21-10 margin in the final round of the Ivy Championship tournament on campus on Nov. 9.

“It feels great,” vice president junior Cat Lambert said about being able to go to nationals. “Hopefully, we can advance and do really well.”

Lambert converted two tries in the first half, as Princeton jumped out to a 14-0 lead before the half.

The Tigers got to the final game thanks to an exciting victory, which saw them overcome a 7-5 halftime deficit against Yale. The team went 3-1 in the tournament after the Tigers had only one week of practicing sevens rugby. The team had previously had a season of playing fifteens games.

Sevens means that there are seven players per team on the field at any given point, and the game lasts just 14 minutes. The other type of rugby is fifteens, also known as rugby union, in which there are 15 players per team on the field, and the game lasts for 80 minutes.

Princeton was not only playing a game in which it had very little experience — it was also missing crucial veteran experience on its roster.

“It was pretty remarkable that we were able to pull out the win with only four returning players out of the 12-person roster,” Lambert said.

There are about 40 people on the entire team — which includes players who play sevens and fifteens. Thanks to heavy recruiting at the beginning of the year, the team boasts an impressive group of underclass players.

“We have a lot of young players that are really working,” senior team president Kristy Giandomenico said. “We’ve got a really strong rookie class, which makes us hopeful moving forward.”

The nationals tournament will take place this Saturday and Sunday and consists of 16 teams divided into four pools. Each team will play the other teams in its pool, and the two best teams from each pool will advance to the quarterfinals, Lambert explained.

The Tigers are expecting quite a challenge — the pool they drew into includes Norwich University, the defending national champion. The other teams in the pool include Georgia Institute of Technology and Davenport University.

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“I have faith in our players, and I have faith in our talent,” junior co-captain Stephanie Kim said. “I’m really excited to see how we do up against the defending champs.”

In order to prepare, senior co-captain Morgan Arthur said the team will take time in practice this week to continue to work on plays and conditioning. Giandomenico added that an increased focus on defense is a must if Princeton hopes to succeed in sevens and that attention will also be paid to cleaning up ball-handling and passing skills in practice this week.

“Because sevens requires a lot of sprinting and open tackling, we’re really focusing on knowing when to turn up the speed and when to slow it down,” Kim said. “[The team is] training for being in control of their speed and really working on their spatial awareness because you have the same size field for sevens as you do for fifteens, but you have fewer players on the field so that means you have to cover a lot of ground.”

This will be the third time in a row that the women’s rugby team will be heading to the national championships. The team came in third place in its last two championship appearances.

“I’m just really excited to play,” Arthur said. “I love sevens — it’s a lot of fun.”