TN 7s Champs Columbia Central Enter New Era

Columbia Central High School entered a new era this year, as head coach Daniel LaFond left the Tennessee program last spring to fellow football convert and apprentice Chris Binkley. LaFond built the Lady Lions to a place where it regularly pulls 50+ student-athletes and wins state and regional accolades, and Binkley is charged with maintaining and elevating the program to new heights.

“LaFond is such a likable dude and did an incredible job creating buzz [for rugby] at the school,” Binkley credited his predecessor’s work. “We both come from football, where players are overworked, exhausted by the time the season starts, and lose passion for the game. LaFond set limits on practice and made sure the players can go and be high school kids. They don’t feel overburdened by the work load and the girls know that, so they know they’ll have fun getting ready for the big season.”

Binkley was introduced to the sport last spring 15s season and thus had little knowledge of 7s heading into this fall. To boot, three of the team’s best players ran into disciplinary issues and were unable to complete the season, and their absences impacted the speedy game for which Columbia Central is known. Binkley was able to get in front of this void and readied the squad for a shift in how they’d play 7s this fall.

“Sometimes the writing is on the wall, that a player might not make it the whole season for us, so I started moving players around and shifting around the formation. It didn’t make sense to them,” Binkley said of digging into the bench and grooming players for new roles. “It took them a while to understand it, that being a prop or lock doesn’t define you as a rugby player. It’s your ability to play a role, to play in space, and mark up and tackle, and ruck. Once they grasped that concept and embraced it, it didn’t matter where they were playing.”

Binkley is still relatively new to the Lady Lions and needed the backing of veteran leadership to get buy-in from the team.

“LaFond was a big personality and the girls idolized him, so I didn’t take it personally,” Binkley said of this testing period. “I had to rely on senior leadership to back-channel everything to get the team to trust the process. That’s what a head coach always preaches. And once we had some success, the trust skyrocketed, and the girls were able to reflect and realize it was part of a bigger plan the whole time.”

The coach credited Lexi Vance and Adrianna Langley in particular for uniting the team.

“We graduated four seniors who are playing in college right now,” Binkley pointed to alumnae at NIRA’s Long Island University and Division I Davenport University. “So we lost some key vocal leadership on and off the field. Plus during the 7s season season, there’s volleyball and soccer, so you don’t get a full season out of those vets. When we started 7s our leadership was totally different than what our 15s leadership looked like.

“Senior Lexi Vance is a very average athlete but she has honed her skill set and turned into something special,” the coach continued. “During the summer she went to a camp in New Zealand and then the main [Bowdoin College] Polar Bear camp, and then two weeks later she was at ARTPC and played in Utah [at the NAI 7s]. She’s someone who worked her way into the starting lineup last year, but wasn’t a vocal leader, and then she returns for 7s and her rugby IQ is through the roof. She commanded the field for us and bridged the gap of leadership when other athletes were playing different sports this fall.”

Junior prop Langley is a two-year starter and has played with the USA South and competed in Las Vegas. She, too, was instrumental in rallying the troops.

“When soccer and volleyball ended, we got our scrumhalf and flyhalf back – both are multi-year starters – but because they weren’t around all season, we couldn’t say naturally: Your leaders are here,” Binkley said. “We had to groom the leadership from what we had, and Vance and Langley supported me behind the scenes and communicated with me. Lexi landed a scholarship to play at Mount St. Mary’s College, and I believe Langley should play at a high level, too.”

Without two of its best players, Columbia Central won its first tournament, but also took a loss to conference rival Riverdale.

“The girls knew they had to dig deeper because we weren’t as dominant as we thought we were,” Binkley said. “We’d see Riverdale in every final, and they’d win every tournament that we weren’t at.”

Mid-season, the team traveled to and won the Battle of Memphis, a first for Columbia Central.

“To go to Memphis and beat Riverdale and beat all the Memphis teams, that was a turning point for us,” Binkley said. “Two weeks later we went to the Battle of Stones River and faced Riverdale in the final. It came down to basically the last play of the game, and we won it on a set play. We punted the ball toward our backs just to flip the field and it bounced perfectly, we caught it in stride and took it in for a try – game over. That whole series of winning Memphis for the first time and then Stones River with new personnel and winning on a set play that we practiced all of the time – that was a major turning point for us. We realized that we’re pretty good even without all of our players.”

Along the way, individuals began asserting their presence on the field.

“We have an absolute stud in sophomore Azhinaye Barner,” Binkley said of the 7s championship MVP. “She’s a converted basketball player so her hands and passing come naturally, and she only needs a little crease and she’s gone. In her first game out, she scored eight tries, which is ridiculous. LaFond compares her skill set to that of [current Life University player and Lady Lions alumna] Adrionna Duncan, but Azhinaye is way ahead as a sophomore. … She is the X-factor on the field. She plays wing for us now but is so strong that we’re going to move her around in 15s, give her different looks and match-ups and diversify her skill set, so colleges can see that she is a gazelle who can run through tackles and can pass.”

At the state 7s championship, the title came down to (you guessed it): Columbia Central and Riverdale. (Related: State 7s highlights)

“Riverdale is super big and super fast, and I would say has more athletically gifted players than us,” Binkley said. “At states I told them: Let’s bend not break. Don’t get caught up in the counter-rucks, but reset the defense, come up hard together, and widen your field of vision so we’re not outflanked.”

Columbia Central was up two scores at halftime and then shortly after the break, a nicely worked lineout moved wide and a final switch saw the Lady Lions score a third try. The team then focused on defense and held on for the Tennessee state 7s championship.

“Early in the season, we were just a fancy-offload team, dangerous offloads that weren’t really sound,” Binkley reviewed the team’s growth this fall. “Then we started to play more 15s-style rugby of just maintaining possession. No more fancy offloads but going to ground, maintaining the ruck and being very possession conscious. We had to be more disciplined on defense when we lost those athletes, and we worked hard on pulling girls out of bounds and stealing lineouts, and that work paid off.

“It’s a whole new confidence for a group who didn’t have it – players who have been sitting on the bench and didn’t know they were standout players,” the coach continued. “Riverdale has this one player who is 6’2” and maybe 215 pounds and runs like a track star. She’ll cut all the way across the field to face our smallest player, a cross country girl, and she wasn’t giving an inch. In previous teams, she might not have seen the field, but because of our shift, she did. The confidence is going through the roof as soon as they had the tools to step up in these moments. And that’s just one example; I can think of three others who are new to 7s and had their moment.”

The experience has been a good one for Binkley as well, and the first-season head coach is ready to keep pushing the program upward. Columbia Central is for the first time traveling to the Carolina Ruggerfest and taking two teams. The outing will not only provide valuable intel on the team’s standing but introduce the Lady Lions to the feel of fielding two 15s teams concurrently.

“Last year we lost the 15s title to Memphis’ Freedom Prep Academy, a pretty special team,” Binkley said. “We’re taking the whole team to Carolina Ruggerfest early in the year so we can see good competition early and fix what we need to work on instead of waiting until the end of the season when we’ll see competition that can slow us down but not have the tools to beat them.”

The top side will compete in the elite division while the second team will compete in the open division.

“Our conference director said that we have massive numbers and it’s time to do more, so for the first time, we’re fielding two varsity teams in the conference – purple and white,” Binkley said. “Why would I even balk at that? My freshmen and sophomores will be playing a full varsity season and by the time they get to the first team, they’ll have two full seasons under them instead of waiting behind players and looking for their moment. It’ll be more work from my end, but in the long run, it’ll serve the program’s upward trajectory. My big thing is that status quo can be very dangerous; we can get complacent on the coat tails of the program’s successes, but two teams will help us move forward.”

Visibility also drives that trajectory, and the team is mindful of opportunities to promote itself and the sport. For example, before the girls soccer team played local rival Spring Hill on Senior Night, the rugby teams played an exhibition match and had the crowds cheering each other on. It drives excitement through the player, community and school administration ranks. Binkley also wants to get the team back to single-school nationals, get involved with the state all-star program, and see rugby launch in the middle schools and in PE, but he needs to make sure he doesn’t underserve any of his current responsibilities, especially in his first season as head coach.

“People ask me: Was it hard to leave football? Do you miss it,” Binkley said. “No. I’m here learning a sport and teaching it from scratch with these girls who are just throwing themselves around with reckless abandonment, and doing a lot of football things on the pitch. It’s such a fun sport and I’m enamored with it. I wish I played in high school. All of the girls at the high school are figuring it out.”

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