(From the Stanstead College yearbook)
Senior Boys
There were a record 33 boys who tried out for this team before the March Break. Some of them got sent back down to junior and we ended up with a solid core of 26 guys, half of which were Grade 12s. Thirteen guys were in Grade 12 this year. Crazy, eh? I will miss you boys, some of whom were entirely new to the game, and I thank you for coming out and making your lost year a year of service to your school. You could have coasted out, but you didn't. You are Spartans through and through. You know who you are.
We started the year with a tough round-robin tourney at WIC in MTL. I wanted to get us some pre-CAIS games. We lost both games but learned a lot. Then came the national tourney at TCS in Port Hope. Four tough games, but we beat BCS on the last day, which was our goal.
We had a new team join our league this year to make it a four-team league again: Seminaire de Sherbrooke. They were a tough, skilled and very well-coached team and had a handful of superstars who play club rugby in the summertime. We gave them o great first half in the final but we were exhausted and ran out of gas in the second half. Nonetheless, we finished second in the ETIAC. We finished third at the Abenakis 7s Tourney out of 12 teams and we beat Essex again this year in our only exhibition mid-season game. Overall, this was an excellent season of about equal wins-losses and lots of character building, which is what sport is really about.
My lost and most important point is this: remember my speech? The mashup of Rosie and DoIf's speeches? Most Valuable People and Brothers? Yeah, well, you are those people now. Brothers and most valuable people from all around the world, playing on the same team. Stanstead did that. Remember and pass it on.
Congratulations to Grontus (MVP trophy), Joke, and Jo for their Major S awards and to Andres and Nick for their Senior S awards - one is like a son to me and the other is from New Jersey. You guys were fearless and more importantly, great team members.
Junior Boys
This year's crop of eager young budding rugby players were, as always, faced with the daunting task of learning a tough new game from scratch with plenty of rules to assimilate and pitfalls to be overcome. And, of course, the weather. Our first tournament at Richmond was played in freezing blizzard conditions, which rapidly turned to fog and ankle-deep mud. The final game was played in 28C and high humidity. In between the players endured driving rain, high winds and thunderstorms. With more experience built on this year, the team rapidly gelled into on effective and winning team, victorious in their first game at Massey-Vanier and going on to crush the local ETIAC 7s league with a record of 14-1. Highlights included Alex Liddell-Grainger's kick-and-run try against ESB, the many bulldozer runs of Patrick Young, the penetrating drives of Jorge Mondragon and the sheer speed of Eduardo Coindreau, as well as many other fine individual efforts from team. Congratulations to Will Huckins, Patrick Young, Eduardo Coindreau and Jorge Mondragon for their Junior S awards for outstanding contributions to this year's team.