by Every Mon., Wed., and Friday the Minnesota Rugby team takes to the field at six a.m. to start working on their games of “7s and 15s”.
“I haven’t played a whole lot of ‘7s’ but I’ll speak on ’15s’,” Sean Doyle, a senior scrum half said. “Obviously it’s fifteen guys on the field. And it’s a little bit slower of a game. It’s an 80-minute game.”
“‘7s’ is the ‘quote-on-quote’ more popular, especially in America, version of the game,” Seth Symound, a forward for the team said. “Especially with colleges.”
‘7s’ is played during the spring rugby season, while ’15s’ is played during the fall. Schools only need fifteen players for a ‘7s’ roster, versus a 24-30 to create a ’15s’ lineup.
The team competes in the Heart of America conference. It is a Division-1 Class AA conference within college rugby. The HOA conference is comprised of other ‘Power-5’ schools; such as, University of Missouri, a school that is popularly known for competing in the SEC-D1 NCAA conference, and Oklahoma State who is affiliated with the Big 12-D1 NCAA conference.
The faster the game – the more head coach, Sean Lindersmith, gets the team conditioned.
“To be totally honest, I don’t think you could ever trained as you wanna be when you’re running 80-minutes at full go,” Doyle joked. “But, it’s just gonna mean you’re gonna run harder in the game. It’s about having the grit and keep on running even though you don’t want to.”
The team competes as Notre Dame on Saturday, April 15, against other Big 10 affiliated schools. The will be competing in ‘7s’ against the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois rugby teams.
