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    Welcome to Plymouth Panthers Rugby
2009 Minnesota State High School Rugby Champions

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• The Plymouth Panthers U19 rugby team capped a brilliant season on Sunday, June 7, 2009 when they won the Minnesota State High School Rugby Championship, defeating East Valley 16 - 15. Two evenly matched teams put on an entertaining display of back and forth rugby, with Plymouth securing the win on a Mitch Bootes penalty goal with minutes to play.  Mitch was later awarded the Player of the Game medal.  Plymouth's pre-game chant gave both the crowd and their opponents an indication that this would be their day.  East Valley came out running strong and their scrum half put in a try off a 5 m scrum 6 minutes in.  Plymouth put immediate pressure on East Valley and put one in at 10 minutes on a superbly executed line-out play 15m out to Zach Arostegui running in on the short side.  Zach was able to touch down near the sticks and Mitch put the conversion over.  Five minutes later Michael Lawrenson slotted a penalty kick from somewhere near KwaZulu-Natal, to extend the lead to 10-5.  EV had a late first half try set up off another 5 m scrum and it was put in by the hooker off the ruck.  The half ended at a 10-10 tie.  The second half was grind out rugby.  Several Panthers stepped up with championship tackling and the squad's fitness was evident.  After 12 minutes of scoreless play, Bootes nailed a penalty to put the Panthers back in the lead.  The lead didn't last long as 5 minutes later EV went up 15-13 on a try after a strong run by their centers from about 40 meters out.  There was 6 minutes remaining when Mitch had the crowd on its feet with a penalty attempt that curved just outside the upright.  Mitch had his shot at redemption a few minutes later as Plymouth was awarded a penalty with 3 minutes remaining in nearly the same spot as his miss.  This time Mitch showed the foot that has made him the premier kicker in Minnesota rugby and put the Panthers up by one.  A desperate EV squad came hard on the kick off and was knocking on the goal line as time wore down.  Ryan Gray stole the ball out of an EV maul and offloaded to Santiago Rugeroni who kicked into touch to end the game - full side, Panthers 16, East Valley 15.
  

Plymouth Panthers Email List

• Join our email lists, pprfc-news and pprfc-loose, and keep up with all the current news! pprfc-news is for the coaches to post information about practice, games, etc. Only the coaches can post to this one. pprfc-loose is for members of the team to talk amongst themselves. Don't worry, the coaches are on the list too. To join, send an email to plymouthpanthersadmin@gmail.com with the following in the subject line: "REQUESTING TO JOIN PPRFC NEWS AND LOOSE EMAIL LISTS". Put your name and what school you goto in the content of the letter. If you are a parent, please state that you are. Once you are put on the email lists, you will receive a confirmation email.

If you have any questions about the Plymouth Panthers Rugby Club or are interested in playing please contact Coach Ken Guenthner at kenguenthner@aol.com.