After a second place finish in the top tier of last weekend’s All-Saints Tournament, the Gustavus Women’s Rugby team improved its spring record to 9-7-1 and has once again proven to colleges around the country that they are a force to be reckoned with.

Playing six matches in a two-day span, the Gusties took matches from Moorhead/UND, Augustana, Bemidji and St. Benedict while dropping decisions against the University of Minnesota and Carleton.

“All-Saints was a continuation of the rhythm we’ve developed over the past weeks and really demonstrated the amount of effort we’ve put in at practice,”Senior and team captain Cydni Smith said. “First place would have been sweeter, but we were playing tough teams who contribute a lot of players to the All-Star and Sevens teams, so we’re proud of ourselves.”

These past few weeks have been a vital part of ensuring that players will gain experience that will likely prove valuable for next season.

“Up to this point I am thrilled with the way the season has been going,” Senior Lindsey Stene said. “We’ve just finally started to click recently, and our new players are beginning to understand the game at a level that they didn’t before.”

Coming off last year’s impressive fall season that saw the Gusties lose only a trio of matches and secure a berth in the DII National Tournament in Florida, this year’s team had a hard time coming back down to earth.

“When I look back on the rugby we played and how we got ourselves to Florida last year, I’m still amazed,” Smith said. “I think we were all happy to be back together and playing again this fall, but it was really disappointing to go from playing at a national level to losing matches.”

The team finished the fall season with a record of 3-4, aided by a pair of wins to close the season out. The fall serves as the team’s competitive season where it can qualify for postseason tournaments by playing mostly single head-to-head matches.

“Following our miracle of a season last year, we were sort of hopeful that we’d get further than we actually did this year,” Senior Brittany Salisbury said. “But we ended our fall season on a high note, so I don’t think that anybody is too disappointed with how it turned out.”

This fall proved to be a period of trial and error for the team, with several lineup tweaks and the introduction of Charlie Johnson as the team’s first ever non-player skills instructor.

“The fall season was disappointing on the scoreboard, but we grew a lot,” Stene said. “It was our first real season with Charlie, and we had a lot of adjustments to make with learning a new style of play and filling in gaps from losing some of our seniors from last year.”

Another key factor to the team’s rough start was the transition to a new set of starters after graduating a group of seniors.

“Our fall season was a great time to sculpt this year’s team and get acquainted with how we were going to play without the seniors we graduated last year,” Senior Marit Kyllo said. “We lost five of our starters to graduation, so it was a challenge to figure out how to take their places and replace their leadership.”

After starting their spring season with a tie and a pair of wins, the Gusties went on a five game losing streak. That streak was followed by a four game winning streak, and in all the Gusties have gone 6-2 since snapping the losing skid.

“This spring has been going very well. We got nine new rookies, and they’ve all surpassed what we had expected of them,” Kyllo said. “These last few matches we’ve been trying to get everyone into games so they can get the experience they need to build the team up for next year.”

Stene cited the team’s performance last weekend and its ability to field a large roster of 33 athletes as the highlights of the season.

“In a tangible sense I would say we’re most proud of taking second place in Tier-1 at the All-Saints Tournament this season, but to me personally, it’s the number of girls we were able to add to the team,” Stene said. “Every one of them has surpassed my greatest expectations and I can’t think of a better group of rookies to take the place of our graduating seniors.”

A strong showing at the All-Saints Tournament helped convince the team that a successful season doesn’t have to include a trip to the National Tournament.

“This weekend was really great. I’m proud of the way our team held in there to play six games in two days,” Salisbury said. “St. Ben’s had beaten us earlier in the season, but we came back and ended up winning to get some retribution.”

The team now looks to use its success last weekend to prepare for its final two matches of the year. Gustavus will travel to the University of Minnesota to play the Gophers in a Saturday matinee on May 7and will play its annual alumni game at the Gustavus rugby pitch at 11:00 a.m. on May 14.

“It was a big achievement for us last weekend to take four of six and get second in the tournament,” Kyllo said. “That result leaves us with a boost of confidence heading into our final games of the year.

Unlike the majority of teams on campus that compete against other schools, the rugby team operates as a club sport, which means that they don’t receive the same level of funding as the school’s intercollegiate teams.

“We like the independence, but it can be difficult at times,” Salisbury said. “It allows us to personalize the team to play the way that we want to, rather than always having to live up to the college’s expectations.”

They are a student-run team, but hired Johnson as a skills instructor in the fall. However, the captains remain the key decision-makers when it comes to the team’s strategies.

“We hired a coach this year, but Charlie is more for drills and skill development. He’s not in charge of the lineups or organizing the team, since our captains do that,” Smith said. “We’re playing with our best friends, so we know their strengths and weaknesses. We know how to motivate each other to play better and work harder.”

Without a full-time coach, the art of creating a successful recruiting program for a club like the rugby team can be a difficult task.

“While Gustavus is a small school, we actually have one of the larger teams because we recruit so much and put such an emphasis on inclusion and skill-building,” Smith said. “Upper division teams have more of an advantage over us because they are often treated more like varsity sports and get the training, administrative and financial support that we just don’t have.”

Since moving up to Division II a few seasons ago, the Gusties have prided themselves on being able to compete at the same level as larger schools.

“We take it as a point of pride that as a small school we can compete with schools that are much bigger than ours,” Salisbury said. “We’ve been able to put together a competitive club with what little we have to work with.”