Las Vegan chases his dream on the rugby pitch

Cassandra Orosz coated her son Devin Short’s fingertips with flour and instructed him to perform a standing high jump on her living room wall.

They had to resort to homemade tactics to complete Short’s application for “Next Olympic Hopeful” last summer, because he’d only learned of the program via a Facebook advertisement right before the deadline. The 19-yearold Arbor View High graduate figured his odds were long but worth a shot to advance his rugby career.

“He did the best jump he could, and I crawled up on the ladder and measured with tape where the flour hit the wall,” Orosz recalled. “He called me a little bit later and said, ‘Guess what? I got chosen.’ ”

Short was one of 90 athletes in four sports invited to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., last July — and ultimately he became the lone male rugby player selected to train with the national team.

He spent the next three months at the Olympic Development Academy in Chula Vista, Calif., alongside the nation’s best rugby players before making the roster for the U.S. Falcons, USA Rugby’s secondary team. Short competed for the Falcons during a January tour of South America that included tournaments in Uruguay and Chile.

Now he’ll play this weekend in the Las Vegas Invitational, which runs concurrent with the USA Sevens Rugby Tourna-