Young Ruggers Win Spring Opener
Having been moved up a division in interscholastic youth rugby, the Section XI Warriors, an 18-and-under side coached by two former Montauk Rugby Club players, Kevin Bunce of East Hampton and by Mike Jablonski of Mattituck, won its first game of the spring season on March 10 at Iona College, defeating the Blackthorn R.F.C.’s interscholastic side 17-5.
“It was a big win for us — I don’t think Blackthorn was expecting it,” Bunce said during a recent conversation at The Star. “They were the runners-up in their division in Pennsylvania last year. They scored first. It was 5-0 at the half, but then we went at them and beat ’em pretty good.”
The Warriors scored three unanswered tries in the second half, two by Bunce’s son, Kevin Jr., and one by Dylan Meloni of Mount Sinai.
“It was freezing that day and wet, so it was a forwards’ game,” the elder Bunce continued. “We’d send our big guys, Nick Lavelle and Rob Lechner of Mattituck, ahead with the ball and then work from there.”
Lavelle, who is a lineman on East Hampton High’s football team and one of the Warriors’ most imposing players, was delighted when Bunce and Jablonski told him he’d be running with the ball a lot that day. “We told Nick, ‘Every time you get it you run till the end, then get it out to your teammates behind you.’ You could hear the bells go off — ding, ding, ding. ‘You mean I get to run, man?’ He must have run it 10 times in that game. You know, when your big guy runs with the ball, the other team sends its biggest guy at you — the big rams come up, boom, boom. Nick ran him over. Pretty soon, they’re sending another guy when he had the ball.”
“We pushed hard in the second half,” said Bunce. “We were good in all the phases . . . just as it should be. We’re trying to get our guys to work in groups of three and to use any of the four options they have — switching, for instance, off of moving picks, if you will, or crashing ahead with guys trailing behind you. . . . Our goal is to get them to make their own decisions, to make it their game.”
There are 25 on the older Warriors’ roster at the moment, a good number. Practices are held at Veterans Memorial Park off Route 25 in Calverton on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, beginning at 5:30, and on Sunday mornings, from 10 a.m. to 12:30.
There were, said Bunce, players — a good number of them wrestlers — from East Hampton, Sag Harbor (namely the Brindle twins, Hudson and Cooper), Mattituck (where Jablonski is a high school teacher), Shoreham-Wading River, Mount Sinai, and Babylon. Sebastian Sanchez and Nick Lombardo are other players from East Hampton.
“Our younger sides, the under-12s and the under-14s, are doing well too. Simon Young and Rob Fioresi, Maureen Rutkowski’s brother, do the under-14s, the Babylon Southside Hookers. The under-12 team plays at Heritage Park in Mount Sinai. I’m hoping we’ll get some young East Hamptoners to start going up there. They went 4-0 last year.”
In general, Bunce said he thought rugby was catching on in this country, whose national 7s side, he said, is the world’s best, and whose 15s side is at present ranked 12th worldwide. The sport could serve as an entree to a college scholarship, and to international play, he added.
Bunce’s son, Kevin Jr., one of the Warriors’ backs, recently attended a “player identification” camp near Phoenix, and, as a result, is to play games for one of USA Rugby’s developmental sides in Ireland this June.
A former protégé of his, Brandon Johnson, also of East Hampton, “played in the Las Vegas 7s tournament for Starz Rugby of New Zealand. He’s been on their team a few times. He’s right there. He’s just got to make the effort. He should be playing for Old Blue, in the city. If he does that he’ll be on a pro roster in the next two years. He’s really knocking on the door.”
The coach at Mount Saint Mary’s, in Maryland, may oversee a two-day high-performance camp here this summer, “in late June sometime. It will be free . . . it should be free. Up the Island, travel team coaches tell you if you give them $6,000 a year they’ll guarantee your kid gets a college scholarship, in softball, soccer, lacrosse, whatever. That’s $40,000 in seven years. You pay to play up there. Here, it’s $120 to join our club, and if you can’t afford it we pick it up.”
The Warriors’ sponsors, among them Charlie and Sons Landscaping, a business owned by Charlie Whitmore, founder of the Montauk Rugby Club, Bistrian Sand and Gravel (having stepped in as a sponsor following the deaths of Ben and Bonnie Krupinski last summer), Scott and Holly Rubenstein of East Hampton Indoor Tennis, and two former Montauk players, Garth Wakeford and Dan Voorhees, had been generous, Bunce said.
As for concussions, “they can happen in rugby, but our ‘ear to rear’ or ‘cheek to cheek’ tackling, keeping the head out, rather than just diving in, has proved to be a safer way of tackling, and we always warm up using balance exercises developed at the University of Bath in England that enable players to maintain their centers of gravity while they’re moving, which helps prevent injury. . . .”
The Warriors have three home games coming up, at Mattituck High School, with Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School of Brooklyn, on Sunday, April 7, with Rockaway on April 14, and with St. Anthony’s of South Huntington on April 28. The games begin at noon, the coach said.