Burrell grads help IUP win Rugby Club Division II championship

RJ Beach and Dom Holmes knew the feeling of teaming up to help win a rugby championship.

The Burrell graduates — RJ in 2019 and Holmes in 2020 — were teammates on the Kiski Valley club team that captured the Rugby Club Division II championship in May 2019.

Fast forward to 2022, and Beach and Holmes again were together for a golden opportunity. This time, they donned IUP jerseys and mixed it up for a national title at the National Collegiate Rugby Division II 7s championship in New Orleans during Memorial Day weekend.

The Crimson Hawks weathered an emotional ride to glory with six wins in six games, finishing off the national title with a come-from-behind 17-7 victory over Lander (S.C.) in the championship game.

“Every time I talk about it, I get excited, like we just won it all over again,” said Beach, a co-captain with West Allegheny graduate Trent Stalling.

“It started the fall semester with a motto ‘Don’t Blink’ that coach (Seth Erwin) came up with. We took that to heart where we just go out and get the job done, no matter what, with no hesitation. If you think too much in the moment, you can get left behind. We knew we were on the big stage, so that really paid off for us in the long run.”

IUP dug deep against Lander in the championship game as it came back from a 7-0 second-half deficit. Holmes was a part of the scoring rally that saw it record 17 unanswered points.

“We’re two weeks out, and we can still say we are national champions, and no one can ever take that away from us,” said Holmes, a rising junior. “As long as we had time on the clock (in the title game), we had a chance to come back. We just needed to get on a roll. The mentality was just to go out there and finish the game strong.”

IUP won three pool-play games and three more in the bracket playoffs.

“From the quarterfinals on, those were some of the best rugby matches I’ve ever played, competitive-wise and team-wise,” Holmes said. “We were down a man in a couple of the games because of yellow cards, but we just continued to play together and not let that affect us too much. We worked on that a lot in practice, so that if that situation ever came up, we would know what to do.”

IUP started its title run with a 12-5 win over Minnesota-Duluth on Day 1.

Beach and Holmes both noted the special meaning behind the win, as it was a measure of payback for the program and a number of alumni who remember a 2013 Final Four loss to Minnesota-Duluth.

“We had a really good year up to the national tournament, but I still didn’t know what to expect,” said Beach, a rising senior with the Crimson Hawks. “It was such a big stage, and we had never been there. We won that first game, and after that, I knew we were in it for the long haul. I knew we had it in us to make it far. We just had to continue to trust in our game and play to our capabilities.”

The first tournament day concluded with pool-play wins over Bentley (39-5) and The Citadel (19-17), which propelled the Crimson Hawks into the playoff bracket on Day 2.

Then came the quarterfinals against UNC-Wilmington.

The teams played in overtime, and UNC-Wilmington got the winning score, initially eliminating the Crimson Hawks.

But a couple of the IUP players, coach Erwin and even some of the game referees, Beach said, had the score 21-19 IUP after regulation.

Further review of game action confirmed the Crimson Hawks indeed were ahead by two, and overtime was not necessary. The sadness of a loss turned into the elation of victory.

“I thought we had won it in regulation as I try to keep a mental track of the score,” Beach said. “Coach Erwin wrote it down, also. Overtime in rugby is like hockey where you normally are given two or three minutes of rest before you start again. They didn’t let us rest or anything. They just kicked us straight on the field. So, we couldn’t argue it right then and there. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. We thought we won, and we were all cheering and celebrating.

“Coach and I, we went up to the officials after the overtime and explained that we had the 21-19 score. We waited a solid 30 minutes to an hour while the referees talked to people running the tournament and everything got worked out. They said the overtime should’ve never been played.”

With the rightful outcome determined, IUP went on to a competitive semifinal match against Northern Iowa, and the Crimson Hawks scored a 29-26 victory for a spot in the title game.

Erwin said Beach and Holmes, who he also worked with as coach of the 2019 Kiski Valley team, were integral parts of the team’s success through the regular season and into the national tournament.

IUP picked up an at-large bid to nationals. Its resume was built with the help of three tournament triumphs in the regular season.

“RJ definitely is a lead-by-example player,” Erwin said. “He’s not the most vocal guy on the team, but he gets the job done for us as one of the smartest players on the field. In New Orleans, he wasn’t the most dynamic player, but he was the guy in the middle who facilitated a lot of our attack. He set up a lot of big runs for people by just pulling in defenders and making a smart decision. Defensively, he’s a smaller guy, but he is a sure tackler. He doesn’t miss very many at all.

“For Dom, this was a breakout tournament. He’s been a solid player, but his one-on-one ratio with a defender was really good where he was able to make breaks over 70% of the time. That was huge, especially in a tournament like that where he was able to hit a lot of home runs and be a very dynamic player.”

Holmes and Beach already are turning their thoughts to IUP 15s season, which begins with training camp in late August with the first scrimmage a couple weeks into the fall semester.

While 7s matches, a fast, high-scoring version of traditional rugby, are played with seven players on each side in two seven-minute halves, 15s matches are 80 minutes (40-minute halves) between teams with 15 on each side.

The Rugby World Cup uses the 15s format, while 7s is the current design for the Olympic Games.

“We hope to take some momentum from the national title into the fall,” Holmes said.