FOR most of season 2018 CSU and the Bathurst Bulldogs women have been fierce rivals on the rugby field, but now they are finding success as a united front.
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Players from the two sides which battled it out in this year’s Central West Rugby Union Ferguson Cup grand final are now joining forces for rugby sevens competitions.
A Bathurst Bulldogs team featuring CSU talents is competing in the new Central West Women’s Summer Sevens series, while last Saturday a CSU outfit including Bulldogs competed at the Wagga Sevens.
They made it all the way to the grand final against Gungahlin, where it took a try in the final seconds of extra-time to end their tilt, going down 4-3.
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CSU talent Claire Woolmington said one of her team-mates had initially posed the idea to compete and with not enough students available, they decided to join forces with Bulldogs.
“It was a mix, there were about four CSU girls, five Bulldogs girls and we even had one of the girls from Orange as well,” she said.
“Because we’ve been playing in the Central West 7s, which has started on a Friday, most of the CSU girls have been playing in the Bulldogs team and I’ve been playing for Emus, so I guess from that we had at least a night or two weeks to get a feel of how each other played.”
While the combined side was a little unsure how they would perform or the standard of their rivals, they made a flying start.
They won their first pool game 29-0 against Batemans Bay and took out the two which followed to advance to the semi-finals.
There they met the Marlins – a team including a number of Central West representatives – but once more they won comfortably to earn a shot at the title.
“We didn’t really know how good the other teams were or how they played, so we were open minded about the whole thing,” Woolmington said.
“But the first couple of games we got a bit of a roll on and thought to ourselves ‘This could be good, we could go all the way here’. We ended up first in our pool, so it was a really good finish for us.”
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While the Bathurst outfit was unable to better Gungahlin in the decider, Woolmington and her team-mates were pleased with their efforts.
“We ended up three tries apiece at full-time. So we went into five minutes extra-time and they ended up scoring right on the end of that five minutes,” she said.
“Our team did really well in defence against them actually because they had quite a large front row and a few outside speedsters as well who were very handy.
“We were pretty proud to make the final and have it go to extra-time, it was pretty exciting.”
