Many of our age grade teams concluded their representative duties this weekend, whilst our U13 and U19 teams are now away on official tournament duty. Starting with our youngest team the U13 boys travelled up to Whangarei to compete in the annual Northern Region Roller Mills Tournament. They opened their campaign with a dominant 62-7 win over Thames Valley and will play defending champions Auckland East on Monday afternoon. Try scorers were Rory Taylor (3), Bradley Sherwood (2), Jackson Gravatt, Duke Larsen, Ned Barry, Sam Paotama and Rory Tapsell with Caleb Tangitau and Rihari Wilson kicking 6 conversions between them.
Our two U14 teams continued their run in the Blues U14 competition, with the Cardinal side taking on Northland North and the White team taking on Auckland West. Unfortunately neither side got the result they would’ve liked, but both teams have done the Union proud and the White team in particular finished their campaign strong to finish 6th in the competition. In the U16 division the two Harbour teams played each other and this game proved to be as much about pride as anything else. The Cardinal side started the game well taking a halftime lead, but White came back in the 2nd half with strong running number 8 Lotu Inisi (Westlake Boys) proving too much. The final score 21-13 to White showing that the Union does have plenty of talent running around in this grade and moving forward into the U18 age groups.
Our U18 team finished their season strongly beating Northland 28-5, with a dominant 2nd half performance which saw Donald Coleman (TGS), James Little (TGS) and Alexanda Tevita (Massey HS) scoring tries. The majority of these boys will now turn their attention to the 7’s season which kicks off in Term 4. Our U18 Girls travelled to Hamilton on Saturday to play the U18 BOP team and were unfortunately beaten 39-5 by a well organised BOP team. The girls can keep their heads high as they finished 4th in the cross-over final, after finishing 2nd in the Blues competition.
On Sunday afternoon our U19 team kicked off their week at the Jock Hobbs Memorial Tournament in Taupo. Qualifying top of the Blues region in recent weeks they had a tough encounter with Otago which saw Otago go in early in the first few minutes and never relinquish their lead. Harbour went down 34-18 and now turning their attention to Manawatu on Wednesday afternoon. Playing at East Coast Bays our Development XV had a tough afternoon, losing to BOP 54-17. The men’s B team had a good win over Taranaki 23-14 with Curtis Reid (Northcote) and Rhema Sagote (Massey) going over for tries. The boot of Jon Elrick (ECB) further extending that lead with a personal haul of 13 points.
Picture by John Rau
The NH U18 Team after their final match v Northland
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