Referees Live The Hard Knock Life

Back In Texas… Making Pizzas

Well, after I am now back in Texas after our rugby tournament and making pizzas at my day job. We arrived into town around 4 AM and I couldn’t have been more sore. The 12-hour bus ride from Nebraska alone would have made my muscles ache, but I had played in both of our Regional matches.

Anyways, the matches went well… The first match was against Wayne St., who was from Nebraska. The first half of the match was solid. The weather was sunny and fantastic, but closer to halftime, dark clouds had started to roll closer to us and there was a slight sprinkle. We played hard, but we were losing by halftime by quite a lot. We were determined to pick it up and keep fighting. But, rain starting falling harder and harder. And the lightnight that was once off in the distance had surrounded us. Everyone was advised to leave the pitch while the storm was passing over us.

We were inside for nearly an hour, which gave us a lot of time to ralk about our mistakes we were making. The forwards, including myself, were no longer allowed to pass the ball because we were making a lot more progress running it. Other than that, we needed to fix a few little mistakes here and there. Don’t get me wrong, Wayne St. Was full of larger guys, but we were winning nearly every scrum, so we needed to capitalize on that.

We came back from inside, but it was still raining very hard, so we had to play with the elements fighting against us, too. The field quickly became muddy and our shoes quickly became heavy. Despite that, we still played hard and kept fighting. In fact, we played a lot better that half than the first. Hpwever, we were still losing. Wayne St. was simply playing better than us…

At one point during the final 10 minutes, the tighthead prop told us as we prepared for a scrum, “You guys just don’t give up.” And we don’t.

That was our first loss of the season but no one was angry or disappointed because we played hard and we lost to a better team. We even enjoyed the match. Out of all the rugby I’ve ever played, that second half was my most favorite.

The next match we had was against the other losing team (Pugent Sound from Washington) to decide 3rd and 4th place in the tournament. We played a lot of players that didn’t play the first match, so I only played the first half. The match was tight, with the ball going from one end of the pitch to the other quite often. The storms had cleared up the night before and the field had dried out for the most part, but the wind that blew the storm away from us had stayed.

We were down at the half with 8 to 10 on the scoreboard, and even went into the lead with a midfield kick, but ultimately, we lost the second match, too.

Again, no one was sad or upset… and no one regretted anything. To think, our team almost wasn’t even going to be a part of any league… We’ve accomplished a lot and that’s something to be extremely proud of.

Nebraska

After 14 hours of driving and eating fast food, we’ve made it to Nebraska! Like I said in an earlier post, we are in Nebraska for the western rugby regional championship! There are 4 teams that are here to compete: 1 from Nebraska, 1 from Texas (us), and 2 others from California. We play against a team tomorrow and after winning that, we play another team on Sunday for the Regional Champion title.

The ride here was very long, going through Kansas and Oklahoma… But I got some work done on a few projects on my laptop, but mostly just played my PS Vita and slept. On the way here, though, we watched one of my favorite movies: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Tonight I’m rooming with some teammates and we’re going to watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

Anyways, the above image is one I took when I was just getting into Nebraska…. When I took it I thought to myself, “Wow, there really is nothing for miles…”

Differences In Rugby and Football Hits

I saw this video a week ago and wanted to share it with you guys. I hope it shows you the differences between rugby and football tackling technique. Of course, you will see that both have the same magnitude.

We Are The Undefeated State Champions!

Since I started this site, I’ve been very quiet about what rugby team I play for. I just don’t like the idea of posting the wins and losses of our opponents, specifically. But, I’m not going to hide what team I’m on, either. If you really wanted to find out, it would be extremely easy.

Anyways, I mentioned here that our rugby team won the state championship in rugby and now I’m elaborate on it. It happened a while ago, but I just cannot go on posting on my blog without making at least one dedicated post about it.

Only months ago, the rugby team at UT Dallas was virtually non-existent. Last fall, a group of about 40 “lads” showed up for practice, eager to learn the game.

During the warm Texas evenings, they learned to run, pass, ruck and maul. A greater interest from students and a new coach fed the momentum.

And somehow, only months later, they are state champions.

The above quote is from our university’s website’s news article about our win in the Texas RUC Division III Texas State Championship. In the article, it goes on to talk about how we were a ‘rags-to-riches’ example of how hardwork and dedication can pay off.

The team hasn’t been around very long… In fact, for the majority of the time when it was getting started, there was not even enough players to make up a team of 15 to play other schools. Eventually, though, more people were recruited. But still, there were problems… Our school’s team did not belong to any league and we just played against random teams in the area… Whenever the rugby season came closer, our coach got a call from an RUC representative who said that a team had dropped out of the DIII league and that would mess up the braket… He also said that that made an opening for our team if we had enough players. Well, we took that opportunity to register into the league.

We played more scrimmages and eventually got into the league matches… Whenever the team was just starting out, we lost many times to other teams because we did not have enough support, or enough members, or the right kind of players yet… By the time the league matches started, though, we had enough players and enough determination to win. And we did win. And we won every match. And we got better. We got better with each match.

Eventually, we were seeded in first place by the time that the championships rolled around since we were undefeated, so we won the opportunity to host all of the championship matches at our university. Well, the first match of the championship was great and gritty. It had rained for days before the match and the field was nice and muddy. Despite the cold and wet weather, we won that match.

There was a few weeks of downtime, and then we played against the state championship match. First of all, I’d like to say that we got a lot of support for the match. A lot of people showed up, even my father and friends who live an hour or so away. Usually in our matches, we have about 15 people show up to watch. They are usually close friends or girlfriends of players. (Sometimes parents will come, too.) But, for our championship match, we set up a Facebook event and posted fliers around the campus. I think what helped the most, though, is that we just spread the information about the match through word of mouth. Everyone on the team told all of their friends and so on. We were very surprised with how many people showed up to watch. There was even a group of students who painted their whole bodies with our school colors!

The match was simply amazing. It was stressful, too. We were losing badly in the first half, but came out to win it. But it wasn’t without a fight. The last 10 minutes of the game, our opponents were within the 22 yard-line of the try line. I think my coach summarized the match the best:

This match was a tail of 2 halves, both sides wanting to show dominance and both clubs being very well coached and poised to play a fantastic match. The mood was electrifing, and with a huge support of students all out in force as well as many of the parents who either drove from Houston, Austin or San Antonio, It was huge and great to see and hear everyone cheering for our lads.

UTSA went out and scored first with a Try and conversion and then added a penalty kick to take an early 10 lead, but your UTD players didn’t give up or lose hope, the battled back, as Nathan Sohadaseni scored the first Try for UTD, but Vince missed the conversion, but later Vince made up for the miss by connecting on a Penalty Kick to bring the score at half time, UTSA 10, UTD 8.

The second half was a pure mess, both clubs got into each others half of the field, but was unable to capitalize on that momentum. It wasn’t until late in the second half that Dominic Prestia scored what would be the game winning Try and Luke Taran would make the conversion.

The final 10 minutes of the match was played in the UTD half of the field, but the lads bent but didn’t break, and those final 10 minutes seemed to last for hours waiting for the referee to call the end of the match and when he finally did, your UTD Comets had outscored UTSA, 15 to 10.

So, what’s next? Tomorrow morning at 8 AM, we are leaving from our school to go to Nebraska for the PacWest Region Championship! It’s a 12-hour drive, so I’m going to be sure to bring my PlayStation Vita and laptop so I can work on some more of my projects. We don’t play any matches until Saturday, and then our second is on Sunday. We only have to win 2 matches and we’ll be playing in Colorado in the national match!

My coach’s blog posts about the championship match: First part | Second part
My university’s article: Rugby Team Rises From Obscurity to Championship

Well, I’m Not Dead!

Good news, everyone! I am not dead! I have not written any blog posts since February, so I’m going to be getting on and working hard to post a lot more! I was going to start posting more sooner, but I needed a lot more material to post about, so I actually went around the net for a few days and got some great material! But, I also have some cool projects to show you guys! I’m close to being finished with almost all of them, so they’ll be posted as quickly as possible!
What have I been up to the last month or so, you may ask…

• Our rugby team won the state championship and we’re going to Nebraska this weekend for regionals! I’ll be posting a lot about that soon.
• I picked up a PlayStation Vita… I have the SDK, too! But more on that later!
• Finished the Mylo Hack Portal
• Did some various other programming projects that I’m ready to share!

I’ll be posting some more tonight and I’ll get you guys caught up and I’ll finally be posting some downloads!

Second Rugby Blurb

So, over the weekend my university had another rugby match in San Antonio. I drove down from Dallas, which was a nice way to get some time to myself, and ended up staying at a friend’s house the entire weekend. If you were wondering why I hadn’t posted anything new over the weekend, that’s the reason. I got some good playing time in and we ended up winning 15 to 8, despite the strong wind and referee blowing his whistle every 30 seconds. Honestly, this guy did not know the rules of rugby and it seemed like we were scrumming for half of the match. Just look how flamboyant he looks in this photo! He sure liked those scrums.

No one broke anything and my tooth is still in the same shape as at the end of the last game, which is good because I figured it would have crumbled to pieces or fallen out by now. And after the match, we met up with the other team at a local sports bar where everyone had a good time.

Short Rugby Blurb

So, my school played our first rugby matches of the year this past weekend. It was great, actually. I got some valuable playing time in and didn’t do bad, either. Fortunately, no one on either of the teams broke any bones, but I did break a tooth. I’m glad that it was just a molar so that it will stay out of sight, and isn’t very painful.

Also, I checked the mail today and got in Jonah Lomu’s Rugby Challenge that I bought from Amazon.com. I really haven’t had a chance to play it, but from what I have played, I see that it had a lot of hard work put into it. The graphics are great and the customization is awesome, which makes me want to get into the rest of the game even more. I’ll probably follow up this post later on with more details on the game.

Impressive Touchdowns

Recently, I’ve seen Jerome Simpson’s front flip touchdown all over the internet. It’s quite impressive so it definitely deserves the attention that it’s getting. I spent some time checking out some other cool football videos and I thought I’d share another that I think deserves some attention.

I think these guys were playing rugby….