Conestoga alumnae Elsa Burgo, Class of 2024, and Sarah Durant, Class of 2021, had the opportunity to play for Atlantis Rugby, an invitational rugby team. The alumnae competed with Atlantis’ senior elite women’s team in the Tropical Sevens tournament in Florida on April 18 to April 19.
Atlantis is a nonprofit organization that hosts invitational rugby teams who specifically play sevens, meaning a team plays with seven players on the field at once as opposed to 15 traditionally. Atlantis’ goal is to promote youth and adult rugby. Both alumnae played on Conestoga’s girls rugby team as well as White Horse rugby team, a club rugby team based in Phoenixville. They played together for one year when Burgo was a freshman and Durant was a senior.
Burgo currently plays rugby for Elon University and Durant plays for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. To find players, Atlantis holds player identification and skills camps. However, both Burgo and Durant joined the team through connections with old coaches.
“This past year I was on the All-Stars team for North Atlantic, and we went down to Atlanta, and our team went second in the whole country,” Durant said. “Then I was honored as an All-American for this past fall, so it was like getting my name out there a little bit in random ways.”
The senior elite women’s team consists of 12 to 13 players with ages ranging from 19 to early thirties. The team played against eight to ten other teams from all over North America. During the entire first day and beginning of the second day of the tournament, the team played everyone in their division. The team was then placed in a bracket and played through that bracket for the rest of the tournament finishing in seventh place overall.
“We went into the tournament (with the) goal not to win but to grow as a team and build that foundational element and then start growing this side of Atlantis,” Burgo said.
Both players are now in Atlantis’ player pool, which means Atlantis could ask them to compete with them again in the future. Burgo and Durant both said they are open to the idea of playing for Atlantis in the future.
“I think this was a good introductory experience” Burgo said, “But now that I am getting older and kind of catching up to the age of a lot of those players, I’d really like to keep playing for them and trying to keep growing as a player.”
Alexa Willrich can be reached at [email protected].
