Talent is good and experience is great, but as far as the recently crowned national champions of Division II women’s rugby is concerned, team chemistry is the key.

The ISU Women’s Rugby Club recently defeated defending national champions University of California-Santa Cruz for the national championship.

“The thing that really made us unique was our team chemistry,” said junior Mary Conroy. “I’ve played on a lot of teams, and this was the closest I’ve ever been with my teammates. It was just like playing with my friends.”

Senior Brian Mond is a member of the Men’s Rugby Club and was assistant coach for the women’s club team.

“When we started playing, we had a lot of individual talent,” Mond said. “As the season went along that talent merged into a team, and that’s what rugby is all about. The better team chemistry you have, the better your chance to win.”

The women’s rugby season isn’t the typical sporting season. Very few games actually contributed to their path to the national championship.

The nation is separated into different territories. The ISU women are located in the Midwest territory. Several different pools of three teams are assembled and each team plays the other in their particular pool. Iowa State’s pool consisted of the University of Northern Iowa and St. Cloud State University.

Each pool’s winner competed in the Division I playoffs; in this instance, Northern Iowa proved to be the Cyclones’ only loss of the season. The team that went 1-1, the Cyclones, were then placed into the Division II playoffs.

The playoffs were held in Milwaukee last fall. Iowa State defeated Winona State and Grand Valley State. This round of games was no breeze, and the Cyclones had a scare from Grand Valley State, who had an early 17-0 lead on the Cyclones.

“Ask any of the girls on the team and they will tell you Grand Valley State was the most intense game they played in their whole life,” said club president Julie Freese.

Iowa State eventually got its act together and came back to win the match, 38-17, and advances to Elkhart, Ind., for the Midwest Championships.

The Cyclones then swept through a couple of Big Ten opponents, Indiana and Purdue, who were both playing in their home state, and moved on to Nationals.

The Nationals were in Samford, Fla., and were the goal from the very beginning.

“I knew we were going to have a strong team. We did well last year and should’ve gone to Nationals but got shorted, so that was our goal for this season,” Freese said.

Conroy elaborated.

“Our goal all year was to make it to Nationals, and we got there,” Conroy said. “Then when we were in Florida we started talking to other teams and they were saying we could actually win it all, and that gave us a lot of confidence.”

Confidence must have been the key. The women took down the University of Mary Washington and Norwich University, which advanced them to the National Championships at perennial powerhouse Stanford’s home field in Palo Alto, Calif., where they would be pitted against defending national champion Santa Cruz. The women were, to say the least, excited to be there.

“Wow. we were all really pumped up. The field was absolutely incredible; the best field we ever played on,” Freese said. “It was the most incredible, amazing feeling.

Within the first five minutes of the game, Ashley Cleveland scored, and we knew we could do it.”

Coach Sara Hillebrand won a national championship herself as a former member of Northern Iowa’s team. This time around, the emotion was still high.

“It was intense and it was stressful, but it was a good stress,” Hillebrand said. “Everyone was excited to play.”

Cleveland set the pace early for the Cyclones with a quick score, and gave the team confidence. Favorable matchups aided the Cyclones to their first ever national championship as well.

“We had a chance to watch Santa Cruz at Nationals in Florida and they beat the other teams 47-0 and then like 30-something to 0,” Mond said. “They had very dominate forwards – fortunately our back line was very good, which neutralized their talent at forward.”

The Cyclones rode their early momentum through to a hard-earned and well-deserved victory over the defending national champions.

“It was just a battle straight to the end. The last 10 minutes of the game were the scariest 10 minutes of my life,” Freese said. “We ended up winning 26-19, and we later got an e-mail from their players saying that we were an honor to play against and appreciating our classiness.”

After the game, the majority of the women cried and hugged each other.

Freese said she couldn’t move for a whole minute because of the amount of hugs she was receiving.

“The feeling I got in my stomach after we won was a feeling I will never get again,” Freese said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience; it was absolutely amazing.”

Hillebrand described the feeling after the game as “definite pride” and said to see the women enjoy the same opportunities she did in college was “absolutely amazing.”

“The way we that we stayed a team throughout the whole process made me very proud,” Hillebrand said. “They were there to support each other till the end. We knew we had to give everything we had, and we did it, as a team.”