South Carolina 24 UGA 0

Athens, Georgia
Friday September 13, 2003, 8pm
Referee: Gareth Morgan

What promised to be a logistical nightmare actually came off pretty well. The new policy at UGA is that when there is a football game on Saturday the fields are closed Friday evening and all day Saturday. We got a waiver for this weekend which let us play our game from 7pm - 10pm. Well, that clearly wasn't going to work as South Carolina said they couldn't be ready to go until 8 and the women were playing, too, but the people that ran the fields were very helpful and arranged it so we could be out there as late as necessary.

With that figured out, we came out against South Carolina and were extremely sloppy. We had trouble keeping possession of the ball, losing the ball several times by knocking it on in contact and several more by simply losing our own ruck. The game was dominated by penalties as both teams played messy rugby. Our forwards didn't give our backs a lot to work with, but we did have some promising play and threatened a couple of times.

Behind some strong running by their outside center and wing, South Carolina won a kickable penalty, which they hit, and scored a 50 meter try from their wing to go into half up 10-0. We rotated our whole team to make sure that everyone got a game (since we weren't positive we'd be able to keep the lights on long enough to play another game). South Carolina put 2 more tries on the board which, I think, they converted for a 24-0 win. South Carolina.

After that the women went out and played their game and looked very good. In the second half of their game the sprinklers turned on in the end zone. After a brief consultation the game continued. Georgia won, but I'm not sure what the score was.

We had time for another period after their game, but by that time the sprinklers inside the 22 were on. We'd put in a call for help with the sprinklers but nothing had happened yet (which is to say, it was still very wet out there). We started the game with the 22 meter line as the try line and the game started. The sprinklers finally went off about 10 minutes into the period, thanks to the aforementioned helpful field lady who came back to the fields to turn them off.

USC had several of our old boys playing for them and we played well, controlling most of the possession. Blake hit the upright on a penalty kick, Brian Sanders caught the rebound and almost took it in for a try, but it was called help up in the try zone. We finished well, finally putting in a try off a 5 meter penalty by Chris Davis to win 7-0 on the last play of the game.

We don't have any pictures of this game, sorry, kids... but we do have a reasonable game film for the first time in years, so hopefully that will be of some use.