October Coach's Corner: Inside Husky Rugby’s Fall Progress & Season Prep

This Fall quarter has been our most exciting in recent years. Among the highlights were with a 10-day pre-season, bringing in 4 new scholarship players and awarding a scholarship to a returning player with a ton of potential, adding coaches to our staff, and a robust medical team supporting our players. Pre-season physicals and Monday training room check-ins are integral to our program now.

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Our player-led rookie clinic was a success, ballooning our roster to 78 briefly, before settling into a more manageable 65 players. We have had 50+ at nearly every training session despite the rigor of UW academics and student life. With more coaches, we split our competitive players for tactical game prep, from developing ones working more on fundamentals.

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It hasn’t been smooth sailing, with several unlucky injuries, we’ve had to pull from our deep roster and will have quite a few sidelined for our season opener in Corvallis – this has given newer players an opportunity to step up, meaning more competition when others get healthy. Our injured players are quick to help coaches with training, supporting the team, and conditioning what they can on the sideline while healthy players run.

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With a varied schedule this week we had only 1 field session on Monday, with Backs/Forwards meeting separately for units. Tonight, Wednesday, we have our first classroom/film session, having utilized all our time for on-field work so far. Our S&C coach has developed plans for 3 gym sessions per week: Recovery, Strength, and Power.

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Our weekly schedule through the end of the quarter will be:

Sunday: Rest / Recovery

Monday: Recovery Lift/Gym, 30min Film, Short field session

Tuesday: Rest Day – no gym or field

Wednesday: Strength Lift, Contact session

Thursday: Power Lift – focus on explosive movements

Friday: Captain’s Run

Saturday: Game Day!

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This weekend is our first Regular Season Fixture against OSU in Corvallis. We put them away in all three of our meetings last year, but they have had a competitive fall season already with an early start. Our 3 exhibition matches this month will have given us a good run up to conference play, two very tough matches and a third against WSU which built belief and confidence that we can string together phases and finish under the posts. The Dawg pack expects to bring Beaver pelts home this Saturday.