Berkshire United Rugby Falls in National Championship
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PITTSFIELD, Mass. -- Two teams from California will face off at Taconic High School Sunday afternoon for the Division 1 High School Girls Rugby National Championship.
Three-time defending national champion Fallbrook of San Diego County will take on the Amazons from Sacramento, Calif., at 12:15 in a rematch of the 2011 national final, won by Fallbrook.
The Amazons were the last team other than Fallbrook to finish on top of the 15-year-old tournament. In 2010, The Amazons snapped a six-year run by Wisconsin's Divine Savior Holy Angels High School.
DSHA will play Kent, Wash., on Sunday in the third-place game.
Berkshire United, which is hosting the two-day event, dropped two games on Saturday in the Division 2 tournament: a shutout to Kingston, N.Y., and a 24-22 decision to State College, Pa.
Berkshire United will play in the seventh-eighth place game in Division 2 on Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m.
"Hey, we're very proud of them just for getting to this point," Berkshire United coach David Colli said after the 50-0 loss to Kingston in his squad's opener. "I think we came out a little flat. We kind of watched a lot, kind of like a deer in the headlights to a degree.
"It was 7-0, and one of our players got a yellow card for repetitive coming in from the side at the ruck. And the ref determined that was a professional foul and worthy of a yellow card, which then had us down a player. They scored twice in that period, and it was 21-0.
"So it was a much different game after that, and it was tough to recover."
Colli said he was happy with the improvement the Berkshire United team showed in the second half against Kingston, and he looked forward to continued growth as the tournament continued.
"The girls played really hard," Colli said. "The last eight minutes of the game is really how we wished they would have played the whole game. But we're not going to hang our heads. We're going to go to the next game."
More photos from this event to come.