Friday and Saturday were big moments in the SASPD rugby season: the first real tournament of the year. With schools coming from Beijing and Hong Kong nothing but the best performance was expected of all teams attending. Hosted at SAS Pudong, many grudges and rivalries were expected to be settled on the field. 

Friday morning the varsity team and junior varsity team arrived at the field in their uniforms, heads held high. The moral in the team was high. Jokes were cracked and pranks were pulled. It all became serious when warm up started. No more fun and games, no more jokes, no more tangents. The only thing in their heads was the game. Vasu Sinha, the captain of the junior varsity team, said he was thinking about “big hits and getting big plays and working as a team”. However this isn’t the case with every player on the team. For new player Norman Wang, this was definitely not the case as he was more worried about the basics. Wang said “at the start of the game [against Hong Kong International School] I was thinking about if I can make my first proper tackle”. At the end of the first day, the spirits in the JV team was high. They had won both of their games that day: the first one, International School of Beijing had lost 12-5 and for the second game SAS PD had beat Western Academy of Beijing with a whopping score of 40-0.

By the end of the tournament both captains thought that their team had shown great improvement. Kai Riddle, captain of the Varsity team, said “Our boys did really well, we are communicating and playing as a team. we have come together and started to play more as a unit, more than as individual players. Over this weekend at the invitational, our performance in each game was so much better than previously in the season, although we may have lost to some tough teams, we picked up some wins because we played like a team. In the games we lost, it was just pure skill based, they were better than us. That doesn’t make us bad but it definitely shows we have room for improvement. All in all, we have come together to be a solid team and are ready to tackle apac in 2 weeks time”. The varsity team had come in 3rd place. JV-Varsity floater Ivan Rubtsov said “Rugby is a sport that emphasizes on the team and our team, I would say, did good. They had good clean outs [in rucks] and perfect scrums, however there is still room to improve. I would say we are not close to the All Blacks [rugby team of New Zealand] but not that far away from them. Our team JV and varsity performed great during the games. I hope next time we can perform better so we can be the same level as Springboks [rugby team of South Africa].