| Last updated at 12:57 AM on 26/11/09 |
Good news, bad news 
Ashley MacDonald wins national university rugby honours but misses chance to play with national rugby team
CHARLES REID
The Guardian
There is more good news than bad news for Ashley MacDonald.
First, the Corran Ban native’s good news.
Her women’s rugby squad, the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns, went undefeated and won its third straight national title with a 20-3 victory over the St. Francis Xavier X-Women at the recent Canadian Interuniversity Sport championship in B.C.
“It’s awesome. It’s been pretty awesome,” said MacDonald, home in P.E.I. for last week’s Olympic torch relay. “I feel like this year we kind of had a dream team. Speed, an attack and solid, solid defence, all the way around.”
And deep, too.
It included nine graduating players, including MacDonald, a fifth-year hooker who graduates with a kinesiology degree in April.
Many team members were together at least three seasons.
The team also counted Ashley Patzer, two-time CIS player of the year, and Neil Langevin, CIS coach of the year, on the Canada West women’s rugby conference-winning roster.
Good thing because, said MacDonald, the three-peat rumbles from supporters and media grew around Lethbridge as the season began.
So the pressure was on.
But Langevin kept the team (8-0 including the title tournament) focused on the games rather than the results.
“A lot of emphasis on the process by the coaches, not expectations,” said MacDonald.
MacDonald’s play this season earned her a third CIS all-Canadian, two from Lethbridge and one from UPEI, where she completed a chemistry degree and transferred west three seasons ago.
The 23-year-old’s bad news?
“I’m on crutches. I’m non-weight bearing for six to eight weeks,” she said of her broken leg suffered on a rain-soaked muddy field with two minutes left in the title game against St. F.X.
“It was an open field tackle. My foot went over the wrong way and snapped my fibula. I was on pretty heavy painkillers the first few days.”
The bum leg threw a wrench into her playing with Canada’s women’s senior national rugby team against France in a two-game World Cup warm-up match last week in France.
Canada split the set and beat the French side for the first time in 11 years.
She said she hobbled what she could of the torch relay and once back in Lethbridge an orthopedic specialist will examine the leg.
She also may need surgery.
If so, it eliminates her from another game against the United States in January in Florida, but she hopes to be ready for the women’s rugby World Cup, Aug. 20-Sept. 5, in England.
Either way, MacDonald’s university rugby career is over and she’s eyeing medical school at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
“I’d like to come back east,” she said.
France and Canada share Pool C in the 12-nation World Cup tournament.
(creid@theguardian.pe.ca)
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