Quinnipiac rugby is cruising — at least on paper.

The Bobcats currently sit at 3-0-2, with two-straight 50-point wins and a tie against reigning national champion Harvard, it seems like they are ramping up for a playoff run.

Coming off a 62-19 win over Princeton Saturday, head coach Becky Carlson believes her team still has a ways to go from reaching their ultimate goal — a national championship.

“Obviously, we put a lot of points on the board,” Carlson said. “The fashion in which we put the points on the board was not in a way we really wanted it to. Princeton capitalized on a lot of our mistakes, mistakes that we shouldn’t be making at this point in the season.”

The dominant wins have been a trend in the last few weeks for Quinnipiac, but Saturday’s matchup with the Tigers was a bit closer, and its mistakes may not have been visible to the naked eye.

“While the average person that doesn’t know rugby watches this and thinks it’s a blowout, we understand that we expect more from ourselves,” Carlson said.

Carlson isn’t just preaching to the choir either, her squad knows what she expects and what is required to contend with the league’s best.

“It wasn’t what we wanted out of our attack and our defense,” freshman back row Ava O’Malley said. “I think our heads were a bit down after the game. Obviously it’s nice to get the win, but I think we have a lot to work on as a team going into next week.” 

O’Malley joins a growing list of Irish-born freshmen who are making a big impact on the pitch this year. With the likes of fly-half Fia Whalen and prop Lily Morris, the Bobcats are wasting no time integrating freshmen into the culture.

“It’s really nice to hear them on the field and support them,” O’Malley said. “It’s really nice that our whole team is coming together, off the field and on the field.”

Morris was absent from Saturday’s game, and her impact was something that Carlson believed was sorely missed.

“We were missing Lily Morris big time today,” Carlson said. “Her voice is really important in the scrum. We weren’t all together in the scrum today, I was a little bit disappointed.”

In a physical sport like rugby, injuries are bound to happen. A key part in a team’s success, especially Quinnipiac’s, will rely on how its role players step into the starting lineup.

Saturday’s game showed there is still room for improvement.

“If you study systems and you look at it, we’re supposed to be able to take something out of the system, and it’s supposed to operate as it should,” Carlson said. “And it wasn’t operating that way today because we were missing personnel, and that’s not an excuse.”

When the goal is a national championship, the best 15 players will play, regardless of class. Carlson isn’t shying away from mixing and matching her lineups to find the best fit come November.

“You have to deliver,” Carlson said. “We had opportunities when we played Penn State last week where people were out of the starting lineup and put new people in because their number was called, they didn’t deliver. They had to sit back down. That’s how that works.”

While no game is a guaranteed win, the last few weeks have allowed Carlson to let more players touch the pitch. But with big matchups against Army and Dartmouth looming, time is ticking for players to assert themselves into the lineup.

“There’s 15 people out there and the top 15 people are going to play unless you have a score that looks like that,” Carlson said. “I don’t intend for there to be or don’t expect for there to be a margin like this again, but your numbers called and it’s understood that you have to perform. That’s your shot.”

The Bobcats can’t get too far ahead of themselves, they still have a matchup with AIC on Oct. 12 to take care of before the heavy hitters arrive.

“I call them ‘October Army’ and QU always seems to get Army at the peak of their season,” Carlson said. “They’re going to come out, they’re going to play a fast brand of ball. They’re going to smash up the middle. They fight for our country, they better be well-conditioned.”

Many of the comments coming from the team may sound negative, it doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Great teams are traditionally hard on themselves.

“It’s very intense,” O’Malley said. “It’s hard, because you obviously want to give it your all, but the environment around it is tough. Sometimes it will bring you down. But like, at the end of the day … we all want to get that national championship.”

If rugby wants to win its first national title since 2017, it shouldn’t expect anything less than perfection.