Ohio State U. rugby will play in the U.S. collegiate rugby championships hosted at the Columbus Crew Stadium Friday through Sunday.
The first-ever USA Sevens Collegiate Championship Invitational will consist of 16 teams from across the country, including fellow Big Ten schools Michigan and Penn State.
“Nobody has played an event like this in this country at the collegiate level ever,” OSU rugby coach Tom Rooney said. “We know a lot about the athletes that are coming in, but we don’t know what kind of system they’re going to play. We don’t know what their style is going to look like, they don’t know what ours is going to look like, so this is interesting.”
Rooney is optimistic about how the Buckeyes will perform in the championships, but said the team is facing a few obstacles.
“The biggest thing that we’re struggling with currently is that we had a large graduation coming out of the fall, so we’ve got a lot of the younger players stepping up right now,” he said. “Unfortunately those players’ skills — their passing, catching, their recognizing the opposition’s weaknesses and attacking them — aren’t as highly progressed as we’d like them to be, and that’s holding us back a bit.”
Rooney said they’ve been working hard to build up those skills, but that they’re things that really take the whole season to “polish off.”
Rooney said another difficulty will be tackling because the team’s size is comparatively small this season. Their goal during play will be to stay out of contact with bigger opponents, though it will surely be forced upon them.
Beyond the team’s struggles, the rugby team has welcomed Nate Ebner, an OSU football defensive back, to play with them in the championships.
Though Ebner walked on as a football player in college, he grew up playing rugby and went as far as playing for the U.S. National U19 and U20 teams.
Rooney said that while Ebner will be a great asset to the team, everyone on the field will need to play hard to be successful.
“Nate’s going to be a big part of what we do, but he’s not going to be able to do it by himself,” Rooney said.
Ebner said that he is excited to be playing again and feels that his previous experience playing teams with high skill levels will help him do well in the competition since there won’t be anything on the field he “hasn’t physically seen before.”
Ebner, an athlete obviously talented in both football and rugby, said his struggle switching between the two sports is tackling: head-in-front in football versus head-behind in rugby.
He said he isn’t worried about his performance in the tournament despite the switch.
“I think we play a different style of sevens that these other teams aren’t going to play,” Ebner said. “They’re going to try and smash into us a little more since we’re a small team, but our style’s going to throw teams off and I think it’s going to work out.”
The tournament plans originally arose after it was announced that rugby sevens would be a new event in the 2016 Olympics.
Ebner, who made the decision to switch to football in order to focus on his education rather than constantly traveling for rugby, doesn’t have plans for after graduation but hasn’t ruled out getting involved with the new Olympic sport.
Ebner and Rooney hope the collegiate championships being held in Columbus will catch a lot of attention for the sport and have a positive impact on both OSU’s program and the sport as a whole, but are now focused solely on the games ahead of them.
“I think if the kids come in with the plan that we’ve given them and the mentality that we’re expecting them to come into the game with, we stand a good chance of making it into the final,” Rooney said. “I think that if they come in and they don’t play like we’re trying to prepare them, they’re going to struggle. Either way, it’s going to be a fantastic thing. This is an opportunity this country’s never seen before.”