By Owen Kitzan – Sports Editor

With warmer weather starting to rear its head in recent weeks and summer quickly approaching, the return to the outdoors has begun for women’s rugby. They travelled down to Biddeford from April 6-8, a town of 21,000 people located on the coast in Maine. Down there, the team took on the host school University of New England Biddeford (UNE), a school of roughly 2300 students and the largest private university in Maine. They also had the opportunity to face off against Bowdoin College, another school located in Maine, about an hour from UNE, with a student body of about 1750 students. 

While the schools may not be the biggest, their rugby teams are nothing to scoff at by any means. Bowdoin competes at the NCAA D3 level and had a record of 8-1 over the course of their season. They have proven to be quite the force in women’s rugby as a part of the National Intercollegiate Rugby Association. UNE Biddeford is no slouch either, also competing at the D3 level for women’s rugby and finishing with a slightly lower record than Bowdoin of five wins and three losses over the course of this year. 

Bishop’s is coming off a season in which they ended with 2-6 at the USports level where they faced off with six of the major schools in the surrounding area: McGill, Concordia, University of Ottawa, Université de Sherbrooke, Université de Montréal, and Université Laval. The team will look to continue to build upon last season in these spring training games and give the women a chance to play rugby while the weather permits before the end of the school year.

These matches offered an interesting opportunity to play against these D3 schools, compare the difference between rugby in Canada versus the United States, and USports versus D3.

Being just off the coast, the team will also be able to spend time down at the beach and explore Biddeford, a town home to one of the earliest European settlements in the 1600s. With the games taking place this weekend, we wish the women’s rugby team the best of luck in their games and hope they have a great time basking in the warmer weather and playing the sport they love.