The College Rugby Association of America (CRAA) 7s National Championships occur this Friday-Saturday, May 2-3 at Kuntz Stadium in Indianapolis. Twenty women’s teams will compete toward Premier or Challenger titles, and all games will be streamed on either The Rugby Network or CRAA’s YouTube Channel.
RELATED: Full schedule + Livestream details
The PREMIER division includes 11 teams of NCAA varsity and/or DIA status. DIA Central Washington University was originally slated to complete but learned earlier this month that the athletics department will not be sponsoring the varsity program moving forward.
So the teams are divided into three groups for Friday pool play:
• Harvard, Life, Princeton
• Army, Lindenwood, Navy, Sacred Heart
• Dartmouth, Davenport, Long Island, Penn State
One pool only has three teams and thus two rounds of pool games on Friday. The other two pools have four teams apiece and three rounds of play on day one. On Saturday, the top-eight teams will contest Cup quarterfinals. One assumes that the top-two teams from each pool will automatically advance to the quarterfinals, and standings points and differentials will be employed to name the 7th and 8th spots. The bottom-three teams flow into a 9th-place round robin.
Cal center Mariah Overby / Photo: Jackie Finlan
The quarterfinal losers move into the Plate bracket, which holds its semifinals at 1:02 and 1:24 p.m. CDT, and those outcomes will set up the 5th and 7th place matches. The Cup semifinals begin at 2 p.m. and the final is 4:56 p.m.
Harvard is the reigning Premier 7s champion. Dartmouth won the Ivy 7s championship, while Army, Navy and Penn State all played in the CRC 7s last weekend. Lindenwood is coming off of the DIA 15s national title run. This competition features all four MA Sorensen Award finalists (assuming they’re all selected to their team’s nationals rosters): Dartmouth’s Cindy Taulava, Harvard’s Tiahna Padilla, Life’s Nina Mason and Lindenwood’s Freda Tafuna.
The CHALLENGER bracket includes nine DI and DII teams divided into three pools:
• Gonzaga, McKendree, Stanford
• Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Grand Canyon, San Jose State
• Air Force, Cal, Western Washington
Cal Poly No. 8 Natali Espindola / Photo: Jackie Finlan
The Friday pool play rounds kick off at 9:30 a.m., 1:10 p.m. and 3:44 p.m. Presumably, the pool winners and the best 2nd-place finisher (determined by standings/point differential) advance to Saturday’s Cup semifinals. Those games will be played at 11:12 a.m. and 11:34 a.m., with the final at 3:50 p.m. Those outside of the top-four will play in a 5th place round robin through Saturday.
DI Stanford and DII Cal Poly SLO are coming off their respective CRAA 15s championship runs. The Pacific Mountain North pulled together a two-weekend 7s series in April involving five teams. Oregon finished first and competed at CRC 7s, but runner-up Western Washington tied the Ducks 26-26 in the teams’ second match-up. Gonzaga finished third and the first-year program is debuting at nationals. Cal, Air Force and San Jose State are all 7s vets, and McKendree is a new DI CRAA member participating at nationals for the first time.