In a rematch of a 26-26 regular-season game played three weeks earlier, Mira Costa’s rugby team was overmatched by St. John Bosco in a Southern California State Championship semifinal match played Saturday at UCLA.
The defending-champion Mustangs fell behind 10-0 and pulled to within 15-12 before the Braves ran away with a 44-17 victory. St. John Bosco will play View Park Prep for the championship on Friday.
“This group was not the same Braves team that hosted the Mustangs three weeks ago,” Mira Costa coach Duke Dulgarian said. “This Bosco team was a much larger and stronger group of young men. Nevertheless, our boys took the pitch and played with great heart and determination.”
The game was played prior to a match between No. 5 nationally-ranked UCLA and No. 10 Utah and a bit of a homecoming for Dulgarian and Assistant Coach Andrew Hunter who were teammates on the UCLA Bruins Rugby teams in the early 1980s.
Their sons, scrum half Harrison Dulgarian and lock Cole Hunter had the opportunity to play on the same pitch where their fathers excelled some 30 years earlier.
Trailing 10-0, Mira Costa got on the board when fly-half Isaiah Leilua took a pass from inside center Justus Tavai and fed flanker Justin Johnson from 12 meters out who ran through two Bosco tacklers for the score.
Hooker Juwan Johnson exploded through the Bosco defense from 20 meters out for the Mira Costa’s second try and Leilua’s conversion put the Mustangs down be three 15-12.
The second half belong to the Braves who wore down the smaller Mustang squad. Leilua added a late try for the Mustangs following a 17-meter burst by prop Ethan Alverson.
The Mustangs won its first playoff game with a 57-21 road win over San Diego Division Champion Point Loma Aztecs.
Dulgarian considered the play of the match coming from outside center Tre Searcy who made a 68-meter scoring Try.
“Searcy made some beautiful moves and broke four tackles, finally sprinting away from the last defender for the score,” Dulgarian said.
Mira Costa finished with a 6-2-1 overall record and placed third in the Southern California State Championships. The Mustang’s only two losses came against blended high school sides.
Since rugby is a new sport, although the fastest growing team sport in the United States, it is not yet a CIF sport so the governing body, Southern California Youth Rugby, allows schools to recruit 30 percent of their teams from other schools.
“They are attempting to make it easier to grow rugby and as a result they have set a 70 percent rule meaning that 30 percent of the players from a school can actually be students that attend other schools,” Dulgarian explained. “This rule actually hurts our program as the Manhattan Beach Unified School District requires only Mira Costa students. That is the way we want it, however it still hurts us when we play a school like St. John Bosco that has about the same number of male students as our school and yet still goes off campus to find players. I feel that the rule actually hurts the growth of the sport.”
Dulgarian, who had led Mira Costa to an impressive 17-2-1 record in the two years of the program’s existence, envisions rugby becoming a CIF-sanctioned sport in the near future.
He acknowledged his coaches, Andrew Hunter and Ali Taylor, for their hard work in building the Mira Costa program and seniors prop Ethan Alverson, lock Cole Hunter, fullback Nick Coons, wing Cameron Harger, hooker Juwan Johnson, wing Matt Large, fly half Isaiah Leilua, prop Josh Madden, flanker Lincoln Personius and outside center Tre Searcy.
