To start off, the club we are playing for is GPS. GPS's facility is located down the street from where we are staying. It is fully equipped with three full match pitches, locker rooms, administration offices, trainers, and a weight room. Also all three fields have lights for practicing at night.
Just about each club in the league has more than enough team members to fill out nine full teams plus extras. The league has structured the competition into Under 20's play (which I am participating in) and Men's play (which Blaze is participating in). They call the Under 20's age bracket the "Colts" and the Men's age bracket the 'Grades."
For Men's play there are 6 levels, Premier, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade, 4th Grade, and 5th Grade. For Under 20's there is Premier Colts, Colts 1, and Colts 2. Pretty much every new player starts on the lowest level team and works there way up and players move up and down based on performance. You can find the schedules and standings for each team and level here.
The rugby portion of our trip started right when we stepped off the plane. After about 27 hours of travel Dave picked us up from the airport, brought us to his house for breakfast, and then we rushed off to the fields. Blaze went to watch Dave and some of the other Men's grades play (which he reported as some real high level rugby) and I slept walked over to the pitch to play with Colts 2 while severely jet lagged. I laced up my boots as we took on a rival club known as Souths. At 20 minutes into the game I stepped on the field at outside center and played the remaining 60 minutes. At about 60 minutes into the game I moved to inside center and I even played the last 10 minutes at flanker. Our team lost, but I still had a blast. We played a backs oriented style of play and I was able to get the ball in some open space for some running room. The game was about even with about 20 minutes left to play, but some defensive structure issues by GPS led to Souths claiming the victory.
GPS trains on Tuesday and Thursday nights at 6pm. On tuesday I trained with the Colts 1 and the Premier Colts and Blaze made a real impressive jump all the way to Men's 3rd grade which is an extremely high level of rugby. My Tuesday night practice was a heavy contact day where we worked on ball security, pilfering, rucking, and tackling. The entire practice was full, all-out live contact. In America practices are much more reserved because coaches are typically worried about injuring players, however, down under there are more than enough players to go around so the coaches do not worry to much about that, resulting in much more contact. Blaze also had a heavy contact practice where they did a drill called "train-tracks." "Train-tracks" is essentially playing a rugby game of pick and go's down a five meter wide channel over and over again until someone scores. We both were tired and extremely sore after training, but we certainly still enjoyed it. We also got the pleasure of learning that we both would be suiting up Saturday as reserves. I will be a reserve back from the Premier Colts and Blaze will be a reserve back from the Men's Grade 3. The Colts are taking on Sunshine Coast at 12:30pm and the Men will be playing Logan at 11:15am.
The style of play here is definitely much quicker, elusive and generally more advanced. The breakdowns are much cleaner and the running lines by the backs are much more sharp. We are continuing to learn more and more each practice and starting to adjust to the style of play much better. Thursday night's training helped us integrate more with our teams as we ran through plays and ran through some team patterns of play. We are excited about the opportunity to play tomorrow and will try to learn as much as possible.
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