Warwick graduates play at collegiate national rugby championships
Four Warwick grads represented their respective colleges in the tournament.
Warwick /
| 30 Apr 2024 | 10:24
Declan Tobin (third from left) taking the field with Highlander Rugby team in the spring of 2023. (
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Colm Davidson holding the Lighthouse 7s trophy that gave the Cardinals a path to NCR 7s championships. (
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Olie Bieling holding the Ivy 7s trophy. (
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Danielle Vogt, tackling her way to second place in the national championships. (
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This past weekend, four recent WVHS graduates, varsity athletes all, took to the field to compete in the National Collegiate Rugby 7s championship tournament in Washington, D.C. Colm Davidson (football, Class of 2020), co-captain for Wesleyan, took the Cardinals to compete at nationals; Olie Bieling (football, Class of 2021), already the owner of a D1 national championship ring from rugby 15s last year, represented the Brown Bears; Danielle Vogt (soccer, Class of 2022) attempted to win another consecutive women’s national championship for the Roger Williams University Hawks in the D2 women’s bracket; and Declan Tobin (cross country, Class of 2023) was the only freshman representing Siena College, which just moved up from Small College to Premier Division rugby.
The competition was fierce, and Vogt’s Hawks were the only team to come away with tournament hardware.
The tournament is an invitational, so to compete teams had to win a major sanctioned rugby tournament in the spring. The collegiate rugby landscape is changing, and many international accents were heard around the venue as teams played a series of 14-minute matches in single elimination tournament play.
While Vogt began her rugby journey in college, all three boys started here in Warwick playing for the Warwick Highlanders, a high school rugby club open to any high school player in the area. With a robust boys’ rugby 15s program and a fledging girls’ rugby 7s program, Highlander Rugby is the only youth rugby club in the lower Hudson Valley. Interested players should reach out to info@highlanderrugbyny.com for more information.