Game Day for Mavericks... Saturday, March 2

It was game day for the Mavericks, all three of the Maverick teams -- Baby Mavericks, Lady Mavericks and Mavericks (the men's team).  So it was off to Laguna again for all of us.  We met by Edsa, jumped in the club van, and off we went.

Our game was suppose to be one of 15's (15 players) but our opposing team didn't have enough players participating in today's game so it got dropped down to 12.  This also meant our playing time of 80 minutes got dropped to only 50 minutes.  

I was told that our opposition, the Makati Chiefs, are a rough-playing team that's more athletic than us but they were much more aggressive than I anticipated.  Within the first few minutes of the game, during one of our scrums, one of our players got pulled by her jersey and flipped over the scrum.  Sorry, I don't know the technical term here except to say I don't care, what I do care about was just how aggressive that play just was.  Yikes.  

I had told myself that I'd be more aggressive in this game and more decisive.  My indecisiveness was my weakness in my last game and I really held back because of it.  Whether I was making a right play or a wrong one, I was going to take the initiative and just do it.  I was going to learn with my mistakes.  And that's exactly what I did.  There was several plays where my teammates yelled at me "Amy get out" or "Amy get out of the way" and there was even one play where the captain of my team pulled on my shorts to literally pull me out of the play.  Consequently, the game from perspective was much more action packed though I'll admit I didn't get the ball as much as I would have liked and tried for.  Regardless, I did a lot of tackling and in one play I even flipped one of the opposition team's players.  I was kind of proud of that, not going to lie.  

I still have a lot to learn about how to play rugby but what I really appreciated was my teammates making the extra effort to tell me to do this or don't do that.  It made for a really hands-on learning experience, literally, and I respect them for that. 

Today's game ended in a draw, 27-27, and it ended with most of us on both teams going home with what is expected to be stiff necks and sore backs, if not tonight then definitely tomorrow.