St Mary's Excel Again at the Tag Rugby Finals

There's a strong tradition of rugby now at St Mary's and our teams continue to show their quality and they have done again today.

After making it through the preliminaries last year today was the finals of the Salford Schools Tag Rugby Tournament at the AJ Bell Stadium. We were up against the other five group winners and boy did we give it a really good go.

We won the first two games - the first a thumping 4-1 victory over St Joseph's with tries from Joshua (2), Archie & Kian. The second giving us the local derby bragging rights against Broadoak as we triumphed 3-1 with Josh, Oliver and Aaron bundling over the line with some excellent straight running and dodging those grasping hands.

In the third game we came up against St Paul's and it was real end to end stuff which is reflected in the scoreline as it ended in the narrowest of losses - 4-3 but the highlight came from Sophie running through to score her maiden try. Even more sweeter as she was captain for the game.

We managed to draw the next game 3-3 against Light Oaks who just sneaked the equaliser on the very last play as we failed to capitalise on our early lead. The team's heads never went down though - St Mary's resilience and perseverance shining through and we went into the last game against Holy Family and gave it our all, again narrowly losing 3-2 although we almost got the draw with Jake just being forced out at the end.

However as the format was a mini-league, the amount of tries we scored, the two victories and a draw, meant we sneaked into third place which is absolutely fantastic. The third best team in Salford is quite a satisfying end to the campaign.

Well done to the whole team today - Faye, Niamh, Sophie, Joshua, Jake, Oliver, Archie, Conor, Alex, Theo, Kian & Aaron for their outstanding performances and the school, staff, parents and children of St Mary's are very proud of you.

But we couldn't have managed it without the brilliant leadership of our Head Coach - Alfie! If anyone shows that sporting spirit and how you should never give up, the optimism that we will triumph then it is this young man. Well done Alfie for leading the energy in the team. We couldn't have done it without you.

Enjoy the pictures and there are a few videos in the Video Resource Section of the website - enjoy Sophie's mazy run.