The UW-Eau Claire men’s rugby club started their season off strong, winning every game so far. They are currently 3-0, and they’re already looking ahead towards the playoff season.

“We’ve won every game so far,” Andrew Boucher, the club president, said. “We’re leading the conference in both points and in points against. We’re doing pretty well.”

Luke Pugh, a rookie on the team, said there has been a lot of learning as the season progressed.

“The season so far has been pretty awesome,” Pugh said. “It’s my first time playing rugby. It’s been pretty cool to learn the sport and play while we’re doing it.”

“We’ve had a great class of rookies. Eighteen rookies is phenomenal,” Boucher said. “A lot of them are athletic and can really play. We only returned seven or eight of our starters from last year, so these new guys coming in have been really crucial for us.”

Boucher also highlighted Cal Schmitz as one of the impactful rookies and for his contributions to the club’s performance this year. Schmitz came over from the UW-Eau Claire Baseball team. In high school, he played football. Now he fills the Rugby team’s scrum-half position.

 “If you don’t know anything about rugby, the scrum-half is kinda like the quarterback. He’s done a phenomenal job. He leads our team in scoring, and he’s two or three for scoring in the conference,” Boucher said. “ He could lead the whole conference in scoring if he has a good game against Northern Michigan this weekend.”

Luke Wilson, another rookie, said he has enjoyed his time with the club this year.

 “It’s fun to be on the team, and it’s even better that we’ve been winning. The team has pretty good chemistry. We hang out quite a bit,” Wilson said. “We’ll get together to eat or something once in a while. Makes it a lot more fun.”

Pugh appreciates how kind and helpful his teammates have been.

“The team has been super good about teaching us everything,” Pugh said. “We really started from the basics. Everyone was really nice and taught us from the ground up”.

The next game is an away game against Northern Michigan and will be the last before entering the playoffs. 

“We have a tough game against Northern Michigan this weekend, but we’re not too concerned,” said Boucher. “We have a strong hold on the conference. I think we can win the whole thing this year.” 

Pugh hopes that they’ll win the conference. “This next game is to be undefeated in conference. It would put us as the number one seed for playoffs and secure us a home game for our first playoff game,” Pugh said. 

“We have a home game against (Milwaukee School of Engineering) on October 21,” Boucher said. “The weekend after that we’ll host a playoff game for the semifinals.”

Sherry can be reached at [email protected].