Well we were waiting for that Big Game to bolster what we suspected, and we got it—St. Ignatius San Francisco beat Sacramento Jesuit.
It's a rebuilding season for Sac Jesuit and a brand new rugby world for St. Ignatius, and SIHS did well to win that game and it takes them up 12 spots. Remember ... for now ... there are more teams ready to take the field. Someone from the Midwest (Moeller, La Salette, Penn, St. X, SLUH) is going to make a push.
La Salette did tie Moeller and moved up as a result. We also bring in Kahuku, which performed impressively at the Puriri Memorial. Now, the issue for Kahuku is finding opposition to play. They get teams coming in to Hawai'i but actually not many from the USA. Why not? A spring break trip to the Islands to play some rugby could be a cool thing for a team to do. Anyway, what that means is it will be tough for Kahuku to move up if they don't play a lot, and they know that and are working hard to build their schedule (not because of the rankings, mind you, but because they want to play more).
A quick note about the Puriri tournament. These teams fielded sometimes their 1st XV, sometimes their 2nds. Sometimes a mixture (or a mixture half-to-half). So, for example, Herriman moves up despite losing a game because they played their younger players in the loss. Their top players looked really good.
Also: we mentioned Herriman's Rylan Southwick in our report on the Puriri but after that he got a very nasty neck injury. Ita's a C1 Jefferson break which, thankfully, can mean no paralysis. But he has a lot of work ahead of him and there is a GoFundMe for him if you would like to help his family out. (We were just talking to his dad watching him play this past weekend). https://www.gofundme.com/f/rylan-southwick-medical-fund
We also bring in Cardinal Gibbons in Florida, but this is based mostly on close losses to strong teams. And eventually close losses are just that ... losses. We think they will improve—they always seem to—so into the Top 50 they go.
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