U Sports legacies being built in field hockey, rugby, cross country

With championship season nicely underway in the U Sports world, constructing and cementing legacies is entrance and centre.

This week we take a look at a girls’s field hockey dynasty, two girls’s rugby groups duking it for the likelihood to name themselves a dynasty, and a Quebec college trying to solidify its cross-country supremacy.

Landmark victory for Vikes

The Victoria Vikes girls’s field hockey group defeated the York Lions 2-0 on in a best-of-three sequence to seize their fourth-straight U Sports nationwide title on Saturday on their residence field.

The Vikes took the primary recreation on Friday 2-0 over the Lions with objectives from Chloe Langkammer of Duncan, B.C., and Germany’s Anni Kleinschmidt.

Victoria’s Cara Butler potted the winner in Saturday’s 2-1 win on Saturday after Kingston, Ont., native Lexi Hannah evened the rating for York at one.

WATCH | Vikes take down Lions to win 4th straight title:

While the four-peat itself is a particular accomplishment for quite a few causes, it is a notably significant send-off for head coach Lynne Beecroft and star defender Anna Mollenhauer, who opened the scoring for the Vikes simply 4 minutes into the title-clinching recreation.

Beecroft, who is ready to retire in January, wrapped up her storied 39-year teaching profession with the Vikes together with her fifteenth nationwide championship, the final 4 of which got here alongside fifth-year Mollenhauer.

“This feels very particular as a result of I knew it was my final yr, so it is an effective way to complete,” mentioned Beecroft to the University of Victoria Varsity Athletics program following Saturday’s win.

“I began my teaching profession successful a championship with Nancy Mollenhauer [Charlton] in 1984, and now I’m ending my teaching profession successful a championship with Anna Mollenhauer—it is an ideal ending.”

The first three-time winner of the Liz Hoffman Award — which acknowledges the U Sports girls’s field hockey participant of the yr — was an integral a part of each title the Vikes have received in the final 5 years, with earlier wins over York in 2018, Guelph in 2019, and the University of Toronto in 2021.

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Clash of the titans

In a story of two duelling potential dynasties, the Laval Rouge et Or defeated the Queen’s Golden Gaels on Sunday to win their second Molinex Trophy in the final 4 years as U Sports girls’s rugby champions.

Both groups entered the ultimate match of the yr undefeated at 10-0, with Laval finally finishing their good season with a 22-5 victory in Victoria, B.C.

WATCH | Laval defeats Queen’s to win U Sports rugby title:

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Championship MVP Audrey Champagne of Quebec City, Que., paced the group to a 9-0 first half lead with three penalty objectives.

Madison Donnelly’s strive for Queen’s early in the second half introduced the sport to inside 4, however tries from Alexina Tardif-Samson of Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures, Que., and Quebec City’s Cécile Leclerc, together with one other penalty objective from Champagne, put the sport out of attain.

Laval’s first title got here in 2019 by the use of a 22-14 win over the Golden Gales.

The Gee-Gees had one other sturdy exhibiting this yr, successful the bronze medal recreation over Guelph, 29-7, after dropping to Queen’s in the semifinal.

Laval cruised into the ultimate by topping Acadia, 68-0, in the quarter-finals and Guelph, 30-8, in the semis.

Cross country in the house stretch

The U Sports males’s and girls’s cross-country championships kick off at Dalhousie University and Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, N.S., this Saturday, with a well-known college on the high of the rankings.

Last yr’s girls’s champion Laval, which has held its high spot in the rankings wire-to-wire this season, are 10 factors away from No. 2 Guelph following a group convention title in Rawdon, Que., on Oct. 29.

The Rouge et Or are headlined by Quebec City’s Jessy Lacourse, who carries a seven-race successful streak into Saturday after successful the eight-kilometre race in Rawdon, which topped her because the Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ) girls’s cross-country champion.

The 2021-22 feminine monitor athlete of the yr will look to guide Laval to their second straight nationwide title, together with the third title in her tenure with the Rouge et Or (Laval received their first-ever girls’s championship in 2018).

The Laval males’s group will even be trying to repeat as champions in Halifax, but they discover themselves firmly positioned behind the McMaster Marauders in the lads’s standings, dropping floor every week to the purpose the place their two-point deficit to start the season has now turn out to be a 17 level rift.

McMaster cruised to gold on the 2022 Ontario University Athletics (OUA) Championships on Oct. 29 in London, Ont., that includes a fearsome mixture of star energy and depth all through their program.

Overall, the Marauders had 5 of the highest eight particular person finishers in the competitors.

Should McMaster earn the lads’s title this weekend, it could be their second in program historical past, practically 60 years faraway from their first win in 1963 — the primary yr the lads’s U Sports cross country championship trophy was awarded.