New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick is giving players a break from training camp at 5 p.m. ET Tuesday, so the entire team can watch safety Nate Ebner as he competes for the United States rugby team in the 2016 Rio Olympics. Nevertheless, Team USA has speed, football experience and Ebner, who is a Super Bowl champion.
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Ebner scored a try, worth five points, Wednesday in Team USA’s 24-19 loss to Fiji. But the USA captain and goal kicker missed the conversion from out wide, leaving the margin at five.
Ebner said he thinks of his father all the time but he didn’t venture a guess as to what his father would think of his boy making it to the Olympics.
“We got here and tried to give this everything that we have. Hats off to them they played tremendously”. The other two strong oppositions from the group, Argentina and Brazil will start their match thirty minutes earlier the same day. They can finish as high as ninth place.
Asked whether he had flicked back into “football mode” for his late hit, which left an Argentinian prone for a couple of minutes, Ebner replied: “Not really!” “We got here, and we gave it everything we had”.
“Obviously those are our hopes and dreams for this sport”. Really, it’s going to be up to the people in the United States and how they respond to what they’ve seen and kids getting out there playing. “We’ll see what kind of effect that has”.
Pre-tournament favorites Fiji and New Zealand will be in the rugby sevens quarterfinals.
“I hope it changes the game”, Ebner said of rugby’s return to the Olympics for the first time since 1924.
Ebner’s participation in the Olympics is a great story. “It was nice to pursue this dream of mine”. Brazil became the catalyst for rugby when it trained nearly two thousand coaches in 2015, resulting to hundreds of schools adopting the sport.
“I love this sport”.
“I just try to embrace the moment, take it for what it is and cherish the moment”.
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“Just as Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick in the 1999 women’s World Cup catapulted “soccer” into the American consciousness, so the Rio Games could do the same for rugby”, The Telegraph’s Daniel Schofield wrote last month.
