Wolverines @ Bears preview-Women's flag

Warwick Wolverines

An interesting matchup this weekend sees Warwick Wolverines travel to Royal Holloway for their second meeting of the year. Earlier in the season The Bears edged the Wolverines in a thriller

The RP Poll - Valentines Day Edition

Talk about a crazy week! Everything happened! We had postponements, conference champions crowned (Ed: technically not crowned...), people sipping on haterade, numerous teams on last week’s poll losing quite convincingly, two of the oddest postponements that I’ve ever heard of, basically, everything happened! The best part of all of this is that we’ve still got a couple of weeks left in the regular season! I don’t think I can take this much excitement...I’m going for a nap while you enjoy (or loath) the list.

AP Top 25 Rankings

Not much change at the top this week with teams winning or not playing to maintain their spots.

Hull clinching the conference title helped move them up to 5th and over a Sheffield team that dropped 4 places after their loss to Derby.

Surprisingly Kingston have risen four spots despite not playing a game, but this is probably down to  conference rivals Brighton losing to BNU although the loss only moved Brighton down two spots.  As a result BNU was the biggest riser of the week moving from 25th up to 20th.

The 'Drop Like A Stone' award goes to Plymouth who let in 50 against an unranked team. They fell to 21st and run the risk of dropping out the top 25 completely with a poor result this week.

Bradford coming in at 25th are a re-entry after appearing in the December edition of the rankings and the only new side are Manchester, who have gradually gained more voting momentum within the sacred 12.  The first edition brought Manchester just 2 votes putting them in at 33rd. Last week they drew 5 votes and moved up to 26th. They currently sit 23rd with 8 votes.

This week sees big games such as Birmingham v Loughborough and Southampton v Portsmouth, which will have a major effect.

1 Birmingham -
2 Hertfordshire -
3 Loughborough -
4 Derby -
5 Hull +2
6 Stirling -
7 Bath +1
8 Southampton +1
9 Sheffield -4
10 UWE +1
11 Kent +2
12 Kingston +4
13 UEA -3
14 Brighton -2
15 NTU -
16 Glasgow +3
17 Portsmouth +1
18 Warwick +2
19 Carnegie -2
20 BNU +5
21 Plymouth -7
22 Cambridge +3
23 Manchester NEW
24 Uclan -3
25 Bradford NEW

Playoff Format

Conversations around the league have taken on a confused and perplexed tone when the subject of the post season arises. Players, chairmen and coaches alike are lost in a sea of words like "tie breaker", "conference rankings" and "free draw".

League chairman/owner/commissioner/god Andy Fuller sent out this email clarifying the situation and giving clear outlines on the tiebreakers and ranking formulas that will be in use.

Read on weary baller, read on!

Elite Women Project Camp

By Andrew Gambrill

The Elite Women Project (EWP) attended the GB Lions mens team residential camp as guests of the National Programme.

Eighteen players attended 2 who were injured but still insisted they attend in their “Civvies.” With 4 coaches and 3 more support staff to ensure the weekend was full of football.

The aim of the camp was to select an 11 player squad for the March Mayhem tournament in London. Eight teams were represented with Coventry Cougars having the most players invited to the camp. In tough weather conditions that are to be expected in the North West of England in February the players went through two 4 hour training sessions as well as individual meetings on the Saturday night.

Becky Rafferty, courtesy of Boom Boom.