Concordia 123, Bishop’s 5: Stingers End Regular Season with a Bang

Stingers Head Into The Playoffs in Style

SportsIreland Compton — Published October 13, 2017

Knowing what they were up against, the Stingers stayed true to their style of play, not going in overly confident.

“You’ve got to give them respect, you can’t not respect the fact that they’re out here trying to make tackles. You gotta get it done, we got it done,” says Stingers head coach Graeme McGravie.

And get it done they did.

Just over a minute into the first half, the Stingers put themselves on the scoresheet with a beautiful try by flanker Genevieve Kara-Vubu.

And the tries just kept on coming.

Team Canada member and Stingers’ veteran Frederique Rajotte tallied six, all in the first half.

It was stats night for Kara-Vubu as well, scoring herself a cool five tries throughout the game.

Overall, it was a solid final regular season game for the whole team.

“I think we all played really well,” says rookie fullback Leah Lavoie, “we’ve had a couple setbacks, the last few games didn’t really go well for us, but I think that helped us come out and do what we did today. After this game, I think we’ve all proved to ourselves that we can still do this, even if people shut us down.”

Noticeable from the very start was how clean the team played, all crisp passes and smooth transitions.

Every tackle the Stingers made connected, rucks were clean, and the scrums were pretty incredible despite there being few of them.

“We played really well, let’s be honest,” McGravie says, “we wanted to be aggressive and we were aggressive from the beginning, so I think that set the tone pretty early on and then from there it was pretty much one-way traffic.”

The Stingers continued to put up points throughout both halves, leaving little room for the Gaiters offence.

45 minutes into the game, Bishop’s came knocking on the Concordia try-line, but the Stingers defence held them off for nearly a minute and a half, regaining possession off a penalty against the Gaiters.

The Gaiters’ next shot at a point wouldn’t come until half an hour later, scoring what would be their only try of the game with just five minutes remaining.

After 80 minutes, the Stingers had taken a commanding victory of 123 to five.

For some, this marks the end of their first ever regular season with the team.

“I feel proud of myself,” says Lavoie of her first season with the Stingers. “It was really hard as a rookie coming in, it’s really intimidating, a lot of the players are [Canadian National Team] and people know them for being good, but training camp was really fun and towards the end of the season it was fun to see the rookies make the game sheet, you feel accomplished at all the work that you did in practice.”

Now that the season has ended, the team looks toward the RSEQ playoffs. They are currently slotted to play the Université Laval Rouge et Or next weekend in the semi-final. Laval sit in the top spot of the RSEQ, with six wins in six games.

The team beat out Concordia by just five points in their regular season matchup.

“I think we’re ready for our redemption, I think this team has been ready for redemption for the last five years against Laval,” says Lavoie.