The first Champion of the 2024 Fall XVs season has now been crowned after the Wheeling Cardinals, in their first-ever season, captured the Women’s DI title with a dominant 58-17 victory over the Southern Nazarene Crimson Storm.
The Cardinals, who went 11-0 in the regular season, saved their best postseason performance for last, combining physicality, elite speed, and an incredible kicking game spearheaded by flyhalf Bella Gulatta to bottle up the Crimson Storm’s dynamic ball carriers and pour on the points. Despite a heroic effort from All American center Telesi Uhatafe, Southern Nazarene could not match the intensity Wheeling showed from the opening whistle.
The Cardinals exploded out of the gate, swaggering up and down the pitch in their all-black jerseys on their way to a 21-0 lead in the first 25 minutes of the game. Uhatafe made it a 24-10 game with two scores before halftime, but Wheeling did not fade down the stretch and outscored Southern Nazarene five tries to one in the second half.
Freshman winger Tamzin Boyce – from Ballygowan in Northern Ireland – showed off her blazing speed on two breakaway scores after halftime. Gullatta showed off her prowess as a field general, leading the Wheeling attack with a strong kicking game which allowed Wheeling to exit cleanly, gain ground and earn points from penalty kicks. The junior also crossed the whitewash for a try of her own, though her score resulted in the only conversion attempt she missed on the night. The Brunswick, Ohio native, who had ten drop goals during the regular season, went 5 of 6 from the tee and nailed a penalty kick towards the end of the first half. Freshman scrumhalf Jemmely Rivera scored twice, with teammates Joelle Taylor and Alli Davis also getting on the board. Sophomore Alexis Dallas, who scored once and set the tone physically for Wheeling all night with bruising runs and tackles her opponents won’t soon forget, was named the player of the match.
“It felt phenomenal to finally have all that work and all that negativity that was directed towards us all season pay off,” Dallas said after the match as her teammates celebrated around her. “To persevere through all the challenges that we went through, that means everything to us. Us winning tonight and going undefeated for our first season shows who we are, and what we plan to be in the future.”
Though Wheeling is a brand new program on paper, they came into this game with years of experience both on the pitch and on the sidelines. The Cardinals were led by head coach Ken Pape, who was hired away from Lander University and brought a number of transfers with him. The transfer core plus a large freshmen recruiting class put Wheeling on the fast track to success from their first match up in September.
For Southern Nazarene this result in the championship will surely sting, though it should not erase what was a dominant season leading up to it. SNU went 9-3 with shutout wins against Missouri S&T, Wayne State College, University of Oklahoma, and University of Texas. They capped their season off with a 130-0 win over LSU before rolling Purdue and the University of Northern Iowa in the first two rounds of the playoffs by a combined score of 117-24. The Crimson Storm are another nascent program with a tight-knit core of players, with the program finishing just its third year under head coach Aric Gilliland. Gilliland has coached many of the players on the team, including his daughters Bayli and Ella, since before they enrolled at SNU through F5 Rugby Club in Oklahoma.
Both Wheeling and SNU will surely be contenders again next year given the relative youth of both their squads – Wheeling has just one senior on their entire roster; a potentially chilling thought for the rest of the teams in DI – but tonight belongs to the Cardinals thanks to a nearly flawless exhibition of speed, skill, and tenacity.
Rewatch the match on The Rugby Network+.
