By Taylor Nigrelli
Assistant Sports Editor
The women’s rugby team will be looking for their fourth win of the season when they take on Fredonia at home Saturday.
According to senior fullback Jen Thomas, the team will be utilizing a new offense Saturday, giving them an edge over Fredonia.
“We’ve been practicing a new offense one of our rookies showed us,” Thomas said. “It really utilizes our scrum players a lot more, which gives the wing time to set up.”
Grad student lock Jess Misiaszek believes the offense will utilize the team’s speed.
“The offense works in our advantage because we’re a very fast offensive team,” Misiaszek said. “Other teams we have played haven’t been as fast and that allows us to tire them out. Basically it’s all about speed.”
Thomas believes this new system will lead to a victory over Fredonia.
“We’ll have a huge advantage in that Fredonia has never seen our new offense,” Thomas said. “Realistically I expect to win. If we play as hard as we’ve been practicing, we will win.”
The Bonnies enter the game against Fredonia with positive momentum from a win over Buffalo State last Saturday. The victory snapped a two game losing streak, after losing to Geneseo and Ithaca.
Misiaszek believes there was some positive to take from the losses.
“Geneseo was just too good offensively for us to handle,” Misiaszek said. “But they didn’t crush us the way they crush other teams. They only beat us by two tries and a kick. We worked well defensively. We played a good defensive game.”
According to Misiaszek, the loss to Geneseo led to the change in offensive philosophy.
“We played more defensively than offensively,” Misiaszek said. “We play an offensive game normally. Playing Division II teams made us realize we need to change things around offensively.”
Thomas believes the loss to Ithaca was due to overconfidence, while the cause of the loss to Geneseo was fundamentals.
“The biggest thing that went wrong was that we got full of ourselves,” Thomas said. “Before the Ithaca game we had won the previous two games. We went into the game assuming we were going to win. Against Geneseo we needed to work on our form as far as play was concerned.”
Misiaszek said the new offense was the key to the win over Buff. State and will be the key to future wins.
“We’re trying to utilize the scrum more so we can run an effective offense,” Misiaszek said. “The lock is like the strong of the team, so it’s our job to support the wing, but at the same time we want to touch the ball as well. We figured out how to do that.”
