THE Capilano Rugby Club's elite men's team came away with a home win over Victoria's Castaway Wanderers in a CDI B.C. Premier league match Saturday, but they had to fight all the way to the finish to get it.
The Wanderers had the ball just yards from the goal line with a chance to score the winning points in the dying seconds but the Caps did just enough to keep them out and secure an 18-13 win. That, said Capilano head coach Tom Larisch, kind of sums up the whole season for his team.
"We seem to be doing a good job of doing just what we need to to win," said Larisch. "Our guys showed tremendous courage and heart, did everything they needed to win the game."
The Wanderers, currently fifth in the Premier League, are a good team and very well coached, said Larisch, but he was hoping for a more decisive victory on home soil for his second-place Capilano team.
"They were missing a lot of players through injury and we should have been able to put a better score on the team they fielded," he said. "We're missing a couple of guys here and there too but we didn't play up to the level we're capable of."
With just three regular season games left before the provincial playoffs begin, Larisch is hoping the days of just squeaking by are going to end soon.
"It's a concern moving forward because we're not executing at the level we need to to have success, to win a championship," he said. "We're obviously competitive, we're sitting in second right now, but we have a lot of work to do."
Larisch said there's a pretty simple explanation for why they're a little bit off of championship form this season: it's because they won the championship last season.
"We've had a bit of a championship hangover and have not been pushing ourselves to the level we need to," he said, adding that the post-title dip was almost inevitable. Capilano won the title last, completing a dramatic turnaround that saw them battle back from being relegated to a lower tier in 2011 to beating powerful James Bay 22-21 in the 2012 provincial final. "We had worked exceptionally hard for a year and a half or two years getting back up to the top and ultimately winning the championship. You've got to kind of read your team - we just sort of backed off a bit to let the guys recover. They're not professional athletes. A lot of them train like professional athletes but they have their own jobs and their own lives and there's only so much you can ask from them. We've kind of backed off - we used to go three days a week, this year we've gone two days a week.
There were other changes as well. Several key cogs from last year are gone, including three high level players - Mike Langley, Ron Johnstone and Akio Tyler - who chose to go out on a high and retire from the elite team after winning the title. Canadian national team player Ryan Hamilton also moved on after accepting an offer to play professionally in New Zealand. That left Harry Jones, a member of Canada's rugby sevens team, as the only currently carded national team member on the Capilano team. The Caps, however, have still managed to stay in second place just behind James Bay. Younger players who have grown up in the system have stepped into the top team's lineup and kept things moving, said Larisch.
Chris Robinson, Matt Yanagiya and Matt Simms - a new addition to the team from New Zealand with strong roots in the game - have led the way in scoring through the kicking game while Mike MacDonald, Nate Rees and Adam Zaruba share the team lead with five tries apiece. Glen McKinnon has also carried over the strong play that earned him the league's player of the year award last season while Rob McCall has provided veteran leadership. But the coaches and players know they will all need to crank it up now if there's any chance of repeating as champions, said Larisch.
"We recognize what we need to do and now it's just a matter of putting the time in and we'll take it from there. We've been kind of coasting and we're good enough to have gotten away with it for a bit here but if we want to actually win the championship we need to really prepare ourselves properly in the next month."
The team is all but assured of a spot in the final four playoffs but they want to maintain their top-two standing so that they'll be able to host a semifinal match. The run for the playoffs starts with a tough test on the road April 6 against Burnaby Lake Rugby Club, a team that is four points back of Capilano in third place and looking to climb into the top two.
"Burnaby is right neck-and-neck with us, they've won six games in a row, they're kind of the hottest team in the league," said Larisch.
The Caps then finish the regular season with home games against the UVic Vikes April 13 and the UBC Old Boy Ravens April 20. If the standings stay the same all the way through and the top two teams make the final, that would set up a rematch between Capilano and James Bay in the championship match. Larisch, however, had no interest in looking that far ahead.
"There's a strong chance it could be a rematch in the final but to be honest this is the most competitive from one through eight that the league has been in years," he said. "The top four teams can easily beat each other on any given day. It's anybody's game. Right now I would say Burnaby is the team I'm for but there's still a ways to go. We're not on our best form right now but we hope to peak at the right time."
All things considered, Larish said he would be pretty impressed if his team did pull off a repeat championship in the highly competitive B.C. Premier League, a circuit that is always stacked with current and former national team players.
"(Repeat championships) have been done in the past but you can kind of compare it to football - it's very tough," he said. "You have a couple of key players change, it's such a physical sport that you just need to peak at the right time, stay healthy and get a couple of lucky bounces. Last year we won by one point in the final. . . . For us to have as many changes as we've had, for us to repeat would be an outstanding achievement by our young players."
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Three Capilano Rugby Club juniors helped British Columbia's Elite Youth Sevens Under-18 provincial team rack up a perfect 4-0 record to win the Hong Kong International Youth Sevens tournament for the second straight year.
Capilano's Cole Keffer, James Oswald and Oliver Smith cracked the team's 12-man roster for the prestigious tournament that also featured under-19 teams from Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and the United States.
Keffer, a 17-year-old Sutherland secondary student, touched down for a try in B.C.'s 21-0 win over Hong Kong University in the final.
The win came one month following a runner-up finish for the B.C. squad at the Las Vegas High School International Sevens where they lost to the U.S.A. High School All-Americans in the final.
