With spring rolling around, a new opportunity opens up for the Montgomery Bucks Rugby Club to not only compete for a championship, but to build new relationships with their team.
For Coach Mike Sciarra, he looks back at his experiences while playing and applies the same focus for the team, playing for each other.
“I’ve been with the program for over 20 years, so it makes it easy when I believe in it, and the people around us, you play for each other,” Sciarra said. “Once you do that, then you start seeing success.”
While trying to send the message on the mental side of the game, Sciarra also believes in seeing growth and improvement from players every week.
“I just want effort. I think most coaches would just prefer effort over anything else,” Sciarra said. “I’ll take a kid with 100% effort every practice who’s lacking in some skills than someone who’s super skilled but not giving a ton of effort.”
For junior Michael McCormick, he looks towards being able to have good communication, stating that “without communication, nothing can happen.”
“Practicing communication is vital to our success, as a team, when it comes game day. Whatever you do in practice shows during a game,” McCormick said.
According to McCormick, the goal of every game comes down to one main thing, to improve as a team, stating that every week has good and bad moments.
“During the week of practice, coaches emphasize the mistakes we made on the stupid plays while trying to get rid of them,” McCormick said. “The message we want to send to teams each week is that, as a collective, we are going to make other teams hate playing us.”
Junior Andrew Bouw enjoys seeing the improvement and growth of first year players, with how “physically and mentally hard” the game can get. He thinks the growth is great.
“Seeing first year players have success early on is always positive not just to them but to the team,” Bouw said. “It shows that their hard work and the teammates pushing them to be better is paying off.”
For Sciarra, leadership also plays a big role in not only winning games, but being able to pick teammates back up after a loss or an inefficient practice.
According to Sciarra, “Older players take a step up when some other people are not doing their part. We’ve been leaving it on our leadership team to talk, re-energize and renovate our team,” Sciarra said.
Sophomore Giovanni Hernadez finds the competitiveness and effort from the team to be motivating and helpful while getting through practice and games every week.
“Everyone plays hard and is competitive, which I think helps create a good environment for us,” Hernandez said. “Though, my teammates always help the new guys get better at their position.”
While incorporating the mental side of rugby, McCormick also seeks success in the physical aspect of the game.
“We are going to score in every possible way imaginable and to be as defensively sound as we can be,” McCormick said. “We will execute beautiful passing and timing to score and we will play smash-mouth rugby to score.”
The team looks to continue their push towards a league title opportunity after their 25-5 victory over Blackthorn Rugby Club.