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PROVO — There were moments when BYU rugby struggled through the first half of its Varsity Cup semifinal match with Central Washington.
But after a halftime chat and a renewed emphasis on defense, the Cougars found themselves in familiar territory.
BYU held Central Washington to only one try, using a dominant second-half performance to roll to a 35-8 victory at South Field and advance to the Varsity Cup final May 2 at Rio Tinto Stadium — the squad’s third-straight appearance in the game.
BYU will play Cal (16-1) for the third-straight year after the Golden Bears knocked off Navy 57-15 on Saturday.
“The first half, they took it to us,” BYU coach David Smyth said. “They were very competitive. We were ahead in the scoreboard, but our boys were having to work hard.”
Smyth said a little change in attitude was all it took for his team to come out fired up in the second half, when they outscored the Wildcats 20-3.
BYU (13-0) knocked off Central Washington for the second consecutive year in the Varsity Cup playoffs. The Wildcats (9-3) were coming off a win over Utah in the quarterfinals of the tournament last week.
The Cougars took the first try of the game barely 10 minutes into the match, when a surging run by Josh Whippy and Ara Elkington sprung Jonny Linehan past the try line for the first five points of the match.
BYU vs Central Washington
<br /><b>Varsity Cup semifinal</b><br /> <br /><b>Scoring Summary:</b><br /> 10' BYU Linehan 5<br /> 15' CWU Coffman 5<br /> 19' Whippy 5, Linehan 2<br /> 37' Linehan 3<br /> <br /><b>HALFTIME: BYU 18 CENTRAL WASHINGTON 5</b><br /> <br />42' CWU 3<br /> 46' Pikula 5; Linehan 2<br /> 61' Elkington 5 <br /> 65' Blaser 5<br /> <br /><b>FINAL SCORE: BYU 35, CENTRAL WASHINGTON 8</b><br /><br />But the Wildcats answered just over five minutes later, and Tyler Coffman finished a string of passes out of a Central Washington scrum to slide into the left corner for a try and knot the game at 5-5.
“We knew it was going to be this way,” Smyth said of Central Washington. “They have great athletes, great coaches, and they’re a bunch of tough hombres. They were very, very physical at the point of contact. All the way around, they were a very good team. They made us work for it.”
Whippy scored what would be the match-winning try just three minutes after Central Washington equalized, picking up an opportunistic ground ball just a few meters from the try line and hustling in underneath the crossbar for an easy seven points after Linehan nailed the conversion.
But the opening 40 minutes was far from easy for the Cougars, who have played in a national championship final every year since 2006 and are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the program this weekend.
“In the first half, we tried to play pretty conservative,” senior lock Dan Hubert said. “At the beginning of the game, our objective wasn’t to play expansive rugby, but to just get us momentum so that we could play that expansive game and get into our patterns later. That’s what we did in the second half.”
Linehan also hit a penalty kick, splitting the uprights from the middle of the field with three minutes left in the half to take a 15-5 lead into the break. But a pair of penalties just a few meters from the try line kept BYU from adding to its halftime advantage.
Those penalties were something the Cougars needed to clean up, Smyth said.
“Any time you give away penalties in their half, inside the 22, it stunts your momentum,” he added. “We lost that momentum, and had to come back and work at it. More power to them in the second half. They did well.”
The Wildcats scored first out of the break, converting on a penalty kick just two minutes into the second half to pull within seven, 15-8. But BYU ended the game on a 20-0 run, capped by Ryan Blaser’s 65th-minute try, set up by Whippy for the final margin.
“We pride ourselves more on the points we don’t allow than what we score ourselves,” said Hubert, who joined with freshman hook Alex Vorster to lock down the scrum. “Today was just about focusing on today. I think that was the most important part. We had to get the national championship mindset out of our heads, and focus on the semifinals. I think we did a really good job of that today.”
Linehan finished with a try, two conversions and two penalty kicks to lead the Cougars, who got second-half scores from Blaser, Ara Elkington and Joe Pikula.
But it was the BYU defense that locked down the Wildcats and held the game in check after a tenuous opening half.
“This week in practice, we had maybe the best week of practice we’ve had all season,” Smyth said. “We needed it; today the boys were able to come out and for the most part do what we were looking for them to do. We got a little impatient on the break at times … but all-in-all, to get a victory over a team like that, I’m very pleased.”
