Crouch. Touch. Pause. Engage.

I’m digging out from under the backlog of email and catch-up reading from a few days away from the computer, but here’s an update on where I was the past several days.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Lou Rabito, “Queens of the ruck: Downingtown girls go to nationals“:

They flew to Ireland to test their game. They will play for their first national title this weekend. And then they will compete in the first state championships.

The Lady Dingoes, the under-19 girls’ team from the Downingtown Rugby Football Club, clearly have taken off.

… The Downingtown girls play in the Eastern Pennsylvania Rugby Union and dominated the seven-team Central Division this season. Buoyed by one of the largest rosters in the girls’ league – 44 deep, Dziunycz said, with not much drop-off from top to bottom – and their experience, the Lady Dingoes won their six division matches by a cumulative 247-7.

Saturday and Sunday, they will be one of eight teams, and the only one from the Philadelphia area, in USA Rugby’s High School National Invitational Tournament at Stanford University.

… “It is a rough sport, I guess, but when I think of rugby, I don’t think of violence,” [said] Courtney DeFelice, an East junior. “I just think of it as a really physically intense sport.”

… The national championships won’t be a picnic, either. [Coach Matt] Dziunycz called his Lady Dingoes underdogs.

“Some of those teams have been in nationals for the last six or seven years,” he said. “Just to be on the field with them is going to be an honor for us.”

RugbyMag.com: Downingtown Finishes 7th at HS Nationals

As one would expect, an incredibly physical match ensued between the Sacramento Amazons and Downingtown for 7th place at the Girls’ High School Championship. What one might not expect was Downingtown’s resiliency on defense and ability to disrupt to hold off a late comeback. The Pennsylvania team held onto a 15-12 win.

We also got to watch a couple of former Downingtown players win the national collegiate title for Penn State. That was fun, too, but the best part of having the college tournament happening at the same time was getting to meet several of the coaches from those college teams. (“She’s a junior,” I said. “And, no, she hasn’t decided yet …”)