Reigning club champs South Bay
The Girls High School Club Rugby Nationals Committee has announced that the 2021 tournament will occur on Saturday-Sunday, May 15-16 at the Regional Athletic Complex (RAC) in Salt Lake City, Utah. More information, including registration details, is forthcoming.
Utah Youth Rugby will host the event and utilize an upgraded facility compared to 2019, when the tournament was held in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray. The RAC is the regular home to the North American Invitational 7s, among other high-profile rugby events, and club nationals will make use of four pristine grass pitches with floodlights and bleacher seating. The championship pitch has a permanent electronic scoreboard, and portable electronic scoreboards will feature on the two other game fields. The State Rugby Organization (SRO) is well versed in event hosting, regularly providing clear, HD live-streams of its high school tournaments and championships, and will bring that quality to the 2021 event.
The RAC is conveniently located near the Salt Lake City international airport (8 miles), downtown and hotel banks. Utah Youth Rugby is working on hotel group rates, and that information will ideally be included during the next round of updates, along with specific registration information.
Akin to previous years, the tournament will host Division I and Division II brackets, and both brackets can accommodate eight teams. When registration opens, teams will indicate which division in which they’d like to compete. South Bay is the reigning DI champion, while Rancho Bernardo won the DII title in 2019.
“DII is an excellent opportunity for teams that are mostly younger HS players or mostly new players to play against teams they’d probably never get to play as well as to watch the DI teams play to get a sense of where a DII team needs to get to if they are looking to compete at the national level,” explained tournament director Pam Laura.
“All this is, of course, contingent on the way the pandemic plays out nationally as well as locally,” Laura added. “We will continue to monitor the Return-to-Play guidelines from USA Rugby and recommendations from national and local health officials.”
For more information, contact Pam Laura.
Reminder: There are two national 15s rugby tournaments for high school girls. In addition to the high school club (i.e., teams with players from multiple schools) event, there is the single-school national tournament, which will be held at Notre Dame College (Euclid, Ohio) at a TBA date in 2021. For information regarding the single-school event, contact John Waliszewski.