The Cape Fear Sevens, always played the first week in July, coinciding with the 4th of July festivities, is one of the most famous tournaments on the US rugby calendar.


Won by English teams Bristol, Harlequins and Bedford in 1984, 1986 and 1991, the Cape Fear tournament the most successful team is NOVA (from Northern Virginia), US Sevens Champions in 1986, who've won the tournament seven times. The founding fathers of NOVA, the Duck Brothers, won the tournament five times in the 80s.


Andrew Davies' Report:


Right off the bat, The Bahamas played NOVA who are a select team funded by a solid rugby man by the name of Bill Gardner who is a legend in US rugby. NOVA are perennial winners of this tournament and were loaded with big guns. They had 3-Fijians of international quality, a kiwi and some top level US players. We were blown away and lost 67 - 0. An indication of how bad things were was that I approached the ref at half time and said

"Ref, can we have another ball please, the other team are playing with that one".

Follow up:

Anyway, the team regrouped, dusted themselves down and discussed among themselves exactly what went wrong. At this point I was very pleased to see less vocal players like Dan Woodside and Kevin Salabie put their 10 cents in. In short, the squad worked out why they got stuffed and drew a line under the poor start and began looking forward to our next match.

Next up were Raleigh, we beat them 28 - 14 in what was a scrappy match but the positives were we started to play a style of rugby that began to at least resemble sevens. The final game on Day one was against a Tournament Select team put together by the organizers as one of the teams in our pool dropped out. This team were no mugs but we managed to beat them by about 20-points. There was the added bonus that our sevens technique and first time tackling had improved immeasurably since the last game and we finished the first day on a high. The only downer was we lost Jonno Sands for the remainder of the tournament to a bad eye socket injury which was unfortunate as he had been having a strong tournament up until then.


The Saturday evening was pretty special. Bill Gardner had met Jeremico Cooper in Cayman a few weeks previously and on the back of this had invited us for a feed and a few beers at his 7-bedroom beachfront home.
He was true to his word and hosted us that evening. The NOVA team were there and The Bahamas team mixed well. It was incredible to hear the Fijian lads talk of their life at home and their ideas on how the game should be played. It was a magic experience for the squad and truly was what rugby is all about.


Sunday was the business end of the tournament as it entered the knock out stage. First up we had the Kenya Exiles who we had watched hammer the weaker teams in the other pool. They had some strong strike runners and some skill full playmakers. The prize for beating them was to face NOVA in the next round and fair play to the team they were up for it, they wanted another crack at NOVA. I thought if we played out of our skins we could beat the Kenyans and that is exactly what we did. We sneaked past them 14 - 12 in a game in which we showed some real grit.

We got what we wanted, NOVA were up next and we were genuinely looking forward to the game. We set three targets for ourselves, first off we were going to score against them, secondly we wanted to be in touching distance of them by half time and thirdly and most importantly, we wanted their respect as rugby players after the humping we took in our previous encounter. The whistle for half time blew and we found ourselves 14 - 5 down after a tremendous first half. Justin Cunningham dotting down after some sterling work by the whole team. We were pumped, we had 7-minutes to go and we were competing well. The crowd was cheering us on and we got stuck straight into them from the kick-off.

They touched down first and then we got another score on the board, again from Justin. It was end to end stuff. We eventually lost 26 - 12 after they sneaked another try but The Bahamas can be proud of itself for the way they turned themselves around after the first day heavy loss. The NOVA players were very complimentary on the enormous improvement we had made in such a short space of time as was their coach who is the US Eagles Sevens coach.


All told a great tournament with much needed big game and big player experience for our young squad. The Cape Fear organizing committee made us very welcome and we look forward to going back next year. Our Chairman summed it up well when he said the best thing about the tournament was we could see how close we are but also how far we have to go. Our fitness levels are nowhere near enough to mount a genuine challenge in a tournament of any real quality and that is what the players need to work on if they truly want to compete outside these borders.


I've attached one photo of Brian who was one of the supporters for the Kenya Exiles who was annoying us. He was off his head as you can see. We found him lying in the grass.