Canterbury College Player of the Week Katelyn Faust /// Photo: Alicia Tsai
Claremont is going for it this season, and the DII Gold Coast college is being rewarded. The Foxes traveled to Ashland, Ore., last weekend for the first-ever NSCRO Women’s Pacific Coast Championship and returned to SoCal with the trophy. The outing also saw season-long standout Katelyn Faust earn MVP and Canterbury College Player of the Week honors.
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The championship semifinals pit Claremont against at-large University of Puget Sound, and Cascade conference’s Western Oregon against CSU Monterey Bay on Saturday. Claremont bettered UPS 66-0, while West Coast conference’s CSU Monterey Bay triumphed 67-10.
“As many times with our team, the other teams outsized us in the forwards and outsized in the backs a little bit,” Claremont coach Evan Wollen contrasted his team with both opponents. “But we’re probably faster and play a wider game or more back-focused game – that happened both Saturday and Sunday. The [CSU Monterey Bay] fullback was a dangerous runner and I instructed the team not to kick to her. The one time we did, our fullback rectified her mistake with a nice tackle.”
Claremont’s style of game overcame both opponents’ forward-oriented game plan, and the Foxes won the title with a 39-10 victory over CSU Monterey Bay Sunday.
“Cal State was a little closer than the score line indicated,” Wollen countered. “There were eight or nine minutes before the end of the first half where they were just outside our 22 and trying to score but couldn’t get over. It was 19-0 to us at that point. We essentially cleared it and scored right after, and that broke them a little bit. They’re a well coached team with lots of dangerous athletes … and for them to come as far as they have in a short amount of time is pretty impressive.”
Claremont saw its share of impressive performances as well. Freshman flanker Sophie Baker, for instance, scored four of the five first-half tries against the University of Puget Sound. Outside center Katelyn Faust, who lit up the DII Gold Coast conference scoreboard all spring, earned MVP honors. The Canterbury College Player of the Week nod comes with the added knowledge that Faust only played 35 minutes in the semifinals. She cut her head and needed staples, then was padded up and scrumcapped for the Sunday final. She scored in both games.
Jesse Ribera (left) and Sophie Baker (right) carrying for Claremont (Photos: Ami Kikuchi)
Even with that lost field time, Wollen praised the team’s best attacker for another impressive weekend.
Attention now turns to the NSCRO 7s championship in Pittsburgh, where Claremont (and the entire West Coast) will make its first appearance. Wollen will lead two weeks of 7s practices, get in a round robin with UC Riverside and Occidental, make selections on the 15th, and then head east for the April 29-30 championship at Founder’s Field.
“We’ve thought about this for three years,” Wollen said of the decision to join the 7s championship. “Every year we get to April – the season pretty much starts in September and it never seems to end. But this year we took a few steps to keep everyone a little fresher. We did nothing between Thanksgiving and January in an effort to stay fresh.”
And now Claremont has some momentum. The Foxes will come into the NSCRO 7s championship as an unknown and will now test itself against the rest of the country’s small-college 7s teams.
For more info on the NSCRO 7s championship, click here.