It's playoff time around the nation. 

While we've already established some champions we've got more to find.

Tempe Wins Arizona, Capping Five-Peat

Brother Martin Holds Off Jesuit New Orleans to Win Louisiana

We didn't file a stand-alone report but F5 won Oklahoma over Bixby 35-15 marking only the second time in 26 years that a team not from Tulsa has won the state title.

Trevor Besabe, Ryan Martindale, Destry Lujan, DeShawn Tate, and Lukas Willette all scored tries for F5 and Jonny Haxton added 10 points from the boot.

Seniors Martindale and Colin Raynor led the way while Parker Stone in the forwards and Destry Lujan in the backs were very good.

Utah crowns state champs in their top tier, Tier 2, and Tier 3. The Tier 1 final is also a crucial game for seeding the Club division in the HS National Championships as both LCA and Cavemen are attending. Southern California sees San Diego Mustangs and Belmont Shore face off in the final (also a key seeding game for Nationals). Interestingly, San Diego has a team in the D2 final and the U16 final also.

Okapi and Key Biscayne play for the florida final ... and the U16 final ... and the U14 final. So they seem to have figured something out. This has become an intense rivalry and was a close game (KB winning) the last time they met.

Northern California has their finals in Premier and Gold divisions. Colorado has their final with Valor vs Denver East HS; Clayton plays Charlotte Tigers in the North Carolina final. 

All to Play for in NorCal

St. Thomas Aquinas won a fairly cose game over St. James to make the Kansas final.

"We've still got just a lot of things to fix, rugby IQ things like that," said Head Coach Tim Kluempers, who got some big work from No. 8 Carson Patrick and skipper Trevor Mogren as forwards while Carson Miller fixed some problems in the backs and Harrison Power was strong at scrumhalf. 

St. Martin's Kingfishers looked a bit more dominant in their semifinal win 36-12 over Wichita. 

Will Van De Ryt was excellent for Kingfishers as he led as a scorer, distributor, and goalkicker.

Meanwhile, we've got some weird things going on in Missouri. The original plan was to have a final this weekend between the top two teams. But, perhaps because of the uneven split between the teams in St. Louis and the teams in Kansas City, that got changes last-minute ... really last minute. So now we have St. Louis Jets vs Independence and SLUH vs Eureka as opposed to Jets vs SLUH with a final later in the day. It's caused some rankling, that's for sure.

Some other big games include Xavier vs Gonzaga, which is another Nationals seeding game, and ... St. Ignatius vs Charlotte Cardinals.

This happens periodically, but not often. This is the top-ranked HS Club team vs the top-ranked HS School-team. Why? Because they wanted to. They wanted to test themselves against the best. Yes there's a risk of injury but, hey, in the end this is about playing tough competition. Ignatius has played a variety of previous state champs. The Cardinals have played the 2024 defending school champs (Gonzaga) and Tier 2 champs (San Mateo). This is where the top teams roll.