Don’t blink, you might miss some of the action
Ilona Maher was a yearround high school athlete in field hockey, basketball and softball before shifting her attention to rugby, which mandated the combined athletic traits from all of the other sports.
The newest member of the United States’ team is an exemplar of the type of athlete being drawn to rugby sevens, a fast-forwarded version of traditional rugby that will be showcased this weekend in San Francisco.
The Rugby World Cup Sevens, a three-day tournament featuring 40 of the best teams from around the globe — 24 men’s and 16 women’s — will unfold at AT&T Park from Friday through Sunday as the game looks to build on the buzz it created during the 2016 Rio Olympics.
“I think it’s going to be
amazing, because an event like this hasn’t happened on U.S. soil before,” Maher said Tuesday. “Sevens is really starting to gain traction, and hopefully, we can add to that.”
As the name suggests, rugby sevens includes seven players on a side as compared with the traditional 15-player teams. The typical 80-minute matches are squeezed into 15 minutes — two seven-minute halves and a one-minute halftime — creating almost nonstop action.
Sevens is played on the same-size field as 15s, so players have more space to operate and greater chances to score. It’s akin to football being played without the linemen, and generally everything in the sport is aimed at increasing the pace.
Conversions must be attempted in 30 seconds, instead of 90. Referees make quick decisions on advantages. And, scrums are accelerated by including three players, instead of eight.
This year’s World Cup is the seventh edition, with the first having been played in Scotland in 1993 and the most recent in 2013 in Russia, where New Zealand won both the men’s and women’s tournaments.
In this weekend’s iteration, 16 men’s teams will play qualifying matches to advance to face the awaiting top eight seeds, a group paced by No.1 seed South Africa. Olympic champion Fiji is the No. 2 seed, New Zealand is third, England is fourth, and the United States is fifth.
It becomes bracket play from there, with winners advancing and losers dropping into “bowl” and “challenge” brackets.
The women’s competition is a little simpler, with 16 teams playing in a straight bracket: winners advance and losers drop into a secondary bracket. The women’s top five seeds are New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Russia and the United States, respectively.
All told, it’ll be 58 matches in three days. At one site. “The Fijian men’s team and the New Zealand men’s team get a lot of recognition and bring out the fans. When we do get tournaments like this, and get to play at the same place as the men, the fans get to see that these girls can play,” said Maher, who led Quinnipiac University to three national titles and won the 2017 Sorensen Award, given to the best college player in the country. “They hit. They tackle. They run fast. They stiff arm.
“It allows us to open their eyes a little bit.”