Rugby Mag Rankings

For years now, Rugby Mag has published rankings and summaries of girls rugby.  Some of the rankings, in particular, appear a little uninformed.  In fairness to any rankings, few have seen all these teams compete in person, so it's very tough to be accurate.  In fact, ranking high school and youth teams in general makes us uneasy as there's a lot of turnover among teams and a wide range of competitive depth in different conferences. 

     Watching the rugby played in the Midwest Semifinals, our field reporter was struck by how competitive these matches were.  DSHA was clearly the best team and a deserved champion.  There success runs nationally, as it's not just Midwest teams they've dominated for the last 15 years.  Sometimes it seems other teams in our territory are penalized for this.  There are certainly a lot of teams and strong programs throughout the Midwest, and this year's semifinals, in particular, were impressive.  In the last 10 years DSHA has only ever lost to four high school programs, and three of those are Midwest teams (CMHS, KM, and Lakewood), all while participating in every National and Midwest Tournament ever held.

     Armstrong impressed a great deal along the way, finishing off a tough St Joe's team, who is on a similar level as Lakewood this year.  Armstrong played DSHA to a 12-0 scoreline for the first half of their match, before DSHA wore them down in the second half.  Armstrong, in our opinion, could even move up into the top 8, especially now that they can finally get outside more as they were still facing snow as little as two weeks ago.  They should be able to improve a lot over the next three weeks.  Armstrong could find themselves ranked even higher in some other rankings after finishing third at Midwest.

     The Midwest in 2013 stacks up as follows: DS (1), CMH (2), Armstrong (3), Lakewood (4)  and St Joe's very close at 5.  Lakewood probably drops out of the top ten in our opinion, replaced by Armstrong, who had a more impressive win over St Joe's.  Lakewood, although still an impressive squad, lost to Parma, Ohio (10-15) in addition to St Joseph's and a Canadian team at the Ohio Classic.  Parma combined with Amherst, Ohio to compete in the second tier at Midwest.

  A few other notes ... Fullerton, California should not be ranked with high school teams.  They run a u-18 program and several of their best players graduated high school the year before.  Their league allows them to compete, but they are not eligible to play in the high school national tournament; thus, they aren't considered here.  The Amazons recently defeated Danville 25-17 in the playoffs to secure their ranking.

We think a more accurate top ten might look something like this;
1 Fallbrook
2 DSHA
3.Kent
4 Summitt
5 West Carroll: Defeated Downington 57-7, who RugbyMag had at#10.
6  CMHS
7 Amazons
8 Danville
9 Armstrong
10 Lowland/Snow Canyon (Play state final 5/11/13)