Utah Valley Crushes BYU-Idaho
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The Utah Valley Men’s Rugby team putting on a dazzling attacking display this afternoon in handing the visiting BYU-Idaho a 71-14 defeat in a 13 try scoring fest.
The Utah Valley team backed up their strong showing against Snow College by hammering a relatively inexperienced BYU-Idaho team with 11 tries. Prop Joe Carnation added to the score line with eight successful conversions from his 11 attempts. The game was much more open than the previous week and the Utah Valley backline responded to that in splendid fashion by accounting for seven of the UVU tries.
“I was hoping for more structure from the boys, especially with such a difficult game coming up next week, but that gets difficult when the score starts to get up” said Utah Valley Head Coach Josh Cooper. “Everyone starts to get white line fever and they all want to scores tries and be heroes, things begin to get messy then. It ended up being a good opportunity to bring some of the second team guys in and see how they played with the first team guys, try out some different combinations and positioning once the game was kind of put away.”
Cooper was particularly impressed with some of the passing to put teammates into space and create long tries, Chase Boyle, Matt Lefrandt, Johnny Schumacher and Dan Ottesen all scoring tries from more than 55 meters out, Dan Ottesen’s try on the half time whistle coming from 15 meters away from his own goal line. A red card to Utah Valley scrumhalf Ethan Timoko in the 10th minute of the game for unsportsmanlike conduct was the only real black mark against the team today and is becoming a troubling trend for the team as that is their 3 card in 2 weeks.
The friendly game was part of Utah Valley’s buildup for their match with College Premier League team Colorado State in Fort Collins, Colorado next weekend. “We needed this game to keep the boys going forward” said Cooper. “I can’t imagine how bad it would be to go down to Colorado State after a bye week, so we’re really appreciative of BYU-Idaho for coming down. We know they’re a young program, but playing these games against Utah Union teams will help them get there game to where it needs to be in the upcoming seasons. It’s not going to hurt anyone to have another strong team coming out of Idaho.”
Utah Valley’s next home game will be on the 16th of October against Boise State University. Kick Off will be at 1:00pm. For info on the team’s progress against Colorado State, you can follow score updates on the teams twitter account here.
