The Men’s National Small College Rugby Organization brackets are slowly coming together, with one national semifinalist already decided, and another set to be decided this coming weekend.

Last week, St. John’s University out of Minnesota, the defending NSCRO 15s champions, defeated Baldwin-Wallace 48-25 to make the Central Region final. There they took on Robert Morris, which had defeated Southern Indiana on Saturday. St. John’s won the regional in impressive fashion 77-10.

Meanwhile, New England College, the defending NSCRO 7s champions, won the New England championship by defeating Eastern Connecticut to run their record in the Northeast over the last three years to 31-0.

NEC plays the University of Rochester this weekend, while Eastern Connecticut plays Tri-State winners SUNY Oneonta. Oneonta is undefeated in their league and is a player-coached team that has managed to handle several physically larger opponents. They use an all-skills all-players approach that often runs opponents into the ground.

Rochester, meanwhile, defeated rivals RIT to win Upstate NY and set up their meeting with NEC. For New England College, they remember being runners up to St. John’s in the final last April in Glendale, Colo. Head Coach Jeremy Treece also runs the American Rugby Coaches Association, which works to train coaches in the art of developing players. His philosophy, FIFTH, provides a framework for coaches to manage their coaching. (FIFTH stands for Fitness, Intellect, Fundamentals, Teamwork, and Heart.)

“One of the issues we run into every year is whether we divide our time to bring new players up to speed, or work with returning players to build on what we’ve done, and see if the new players catch up,” said Treece. “This year, with about 90% of the team that went to Nationals coming back, we decided to concentrate on the returning players. But using FIFTH, the new players caught up pretty quickly. We work on being good teammates first, so that spread out to the freshmen and sophomores on the team. And our returning players were able to get everyone with the program.”

Leading the way for NEC are, among others, Kyle Driscoll and Ky Young, who both played for Union HS in Oklahoma and somehow found their way to New Hampshire. Ian Luciano is a US-born student who great up playing rugby in Australia, while Austin White is a former football player at Northeastern Oklahoma who is a dangerous attacker but who has been struggling with hamstring injuries.

NEC is favored to win this weekend, but NSCRO teams are often isolated in their conferences, and so anyone can be a surprise. Oneonta’s defense is impressive, while Eastern Connecticut gave NEC one of their most challenging games this season. Rochester lost an early game to RIT (who aren’t playoff eligible because their school is too big), but won the rematch after running the rest of the table.