USA U20s Head Coach Scott Lawrence was not as nervous as you might think when his team fell behind 14-0 early on in the Junior World Rugby Trophy final against Japan on Saturday.

Fans might have been worried,  but the coaching staff were not surprised.

“We knew there was some potential there for that,” said Lawrence. “I think, if we had led every single game up until that point and we hadn’t seen the team react to those sorts of situations, then we might have been concerned. But given that we’ve been in the situation before, and given what we knew about the team, we knew they could get on the scoreboard and build from that.”

Simple. They had fallen behind against Canada in Canada. They had fallen behind to Tonga. They were ahead only 10-5 over Russia with 20 minutes gone. Yes, they had been under pressure.

For Lawrence, the comeback that culminated in a 37-33 victory and Junior World Trophy championship, was a function of not only the type of athletes on the field, but the type of young men.

“One of the things we worked with them throughout the entire year was never focusing on the result,” said Lawrence. “We discussed the game only in terms of what we could do. We didn’t even mention Tonga until the day of the game. We focused on our performance, on what we could control. And the guys on the team did a really good job of living minute-to-minute.”

They also did a good job of thinking long-term. Look at how the players prepared for the JWRT. Most of the squad – everyone who could – went to Colorado on their own to train before the squad convened en masse in Steamboat Springs, Colo. in a massive team house provided at very low cost by a rugby-connected realtor.

The players trained, hard, at altitude, cooked for each other, and became a single unit.

“Going to Colorado before Steamboat was optional,” said Lawrence. “But the guys did it, sleeping on couches. People in the area volunteered to feed host them. It brought them together. Then in Steamboat, cooking for each other, keeping the house clean, all on top of those hard training days … they just had an excellent attitude. We had the basics coming out of Canada, so when we went to Steamboat it was just repetition, repetition, repetition. But credit to the group; we would train for four hours and at 3 hours, 50 minutes  they’d be just as dialed in as at the beginning. They are a special group.”

Fast forward to the game against Japan. Lawrence was up nights crafting a plan with his coaching staff, and he focused on one thing, something the dovetailed nicely into the team’s attitude:

Lawrence saw that 93% of Japan’s multi-phase rugby was played inside the opposition 22. It meant that they wore teams out in the green zone. So the USA U20s trained defense in that zone. Between their final pool game and the final, that’s all they did.

Looking on the final five minutes, where the USA players defended desperately to prevent the winning try, Lawrence said: “It ended up being the thing.”

And it wouldn’t have been the thing, had the players on the USA U20 squad not dedicated everything for that moment.


Notes: Madison Hughes led all players with 72 points in the JWRT. That, along with his ten points in 2011, gives him 82 all-time, tied with Romania's Stefan Patrascu for the most ever. The 72 points Hughes scored this year is a JWRT record by a considerable margin ... all players on the USA U20s squad for the JWRT final were USA passport holders ...