RUG: Hard-hitting playoff action kicks off Thursday

For the first 20 seasons of women’s rugby in Canada West, the UBC T-Birds were unable to soar to championship heights.

But over three years since then, UBC is the only team that has captured the Canada West Women’s Rugby Trophy.

Now the T-Birds can solidify themselves as a dynasty by winning a third straight title, this weekend at the 2022 Canada West women’s rugby playoffs in Edmonton hosted by the University of Alberta.

Semi-final Thursday (Oct. 20) will see the T-Birds face the Alberta Pandas at 3:30 p.m. MDT, following a clash between the Calgary Dinos and Victoria Vikes at 1 p.m. MDT. The winning teams will meet in the championship final at 1 p.m. MDT on Sunday (Oct. 23). All games take place at Foote Field on the University of Alberta south campus and will be broadcast live on Canada West TV.

UBC had a 4-0-1 record in the regular season and finished atop the table with 23 points. The only blemish on the T-Birds’ record was a 31-31 draw against Victoria in their final game of the season, last Saturday (Oct. 15), which ended a streak of 16 straight wins in the regular season and playoffs against Canada West opponents.

Otherwise, the T-Birds have picked up right where they left off last October, when they won their second Canada West title with a 47-13 victory over the Vikes in the championship final hosted by the University of Calgary.

“We’re pretty similar to be quite honest, we haven’t changed a lot … the way we want to play and the way we have been playing has been the same, so nothing changed on our behalf because we’ve got the similar sort of squad,” T-Birds coach Dean Murten says. “We’ve looked at our strengths, we’ve looked at our weaknesses, and we’re pretty much where we last year.”

The T-Birds’ big breakthrough came in 2019, when they knocked off the three-time defending champion Dinos in the gold medal game to give UBC its first Canada West women’s rugby crown. While the cancelation of the 2020 season because of the pandemic could have derailed UBC’s momentum, the T-Birds made the most of a difficult situation by building on their progression.

“We looked at it as an opportunity to get better at certain things” says Murten. “We worked really hard on certain areas of the game that sometimes you don’t get the chance to do in the regular season … so I felt that going back into (the 2021) season, we were the best we’d ever been from a skill development point of view, a structure point of view, players being fresh, but also having that appetite to get back to competing.”

Should the T-Birds triumph this weekend in Edmonton, UBC would become the fourth Canada West women’s rugby program with a three-peat to its credit, joining Alberta, Calgary, and Lethbridge.

The T-Birds have a long way to go to match Alberta’s record of seven consecutive conference titles, which the Pandas won between 1999 and 2005, but now that his program has arrived, Murten intends to make it a fixture in the conference championship picture. 

The 2021 recipient of the Jim Atkinson Award, as U SPORTS women’s rugby coach of the year, has developed a sustainable program, with a pool of 70 players and a development squad that plays club rugby in B.C.

“I don’t want to be this team that wins for one year, maybe two years, and then goes missing,” says Murten, who has also won the last two Canada West women’s rugby coach of the year awards. “And I’m not saying we are going to win it three years in a row but what I am saying is we’re always going to be there competing because we’ve got a development system.

“I’ve got 40 girls that are playing club rugby at the moment, because next year they need to step up and fulfill the places (of the players) that we’re going to lose.”

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