Twelve teams will now compete for the Varsity 7s title, with the competitors being split up into three pools.
CPUT, Wits and WSU will form part of the best 12 university sevens teams in the country that will compete at the Varsity 7s tournament from 5-6 October at Pirates Green Side.
The tournament will take on a pool format, instead of the round robin format of previous years. The 12 teams have been split into three pools with four teams in each pool. The top two teams per group and next best two teams qualify for the Varsity 7s quarter-finals.
Varsity 7s manager Xhanti-Lomzi Nesi explained that the change in format was to prepare the players for the higher echelons of the game as well as creating an improved product for spectators.
“The reason we wanted to take Varsity 7s from the full round robin format to pool stages, was that it was in the best commercial interest of the business and of our sponsors. We found that we lost a lot of consumers through a three-day tournament. The market became over saturated with people watching 7s from early in the morning to late in the afternoons, and over three days. We believed it would be able to captivate the audience and the crowd if we played it over two days.
“It also allows the teams to play in a more traditional 7s set up as they do in other 7s tournaments, such as USSA where they qualify for the Varsity 7s tournament.”
Varsity 7s Pools
Pool A: UWC (University of the Western Cape), CPUT (Cape Peninsula University of Technology), NMU (Nelson Mandela University), WSU (Walter Sisulu University)
Pool B: UJ (University of Johannesburg), UP-Tuks (University of Pretoria), UCT (University of Cape Town), Wits (University of the Witwatersrand)
Pool C: NWU-Pukke (North-West University), Maties (Stellenbosch University), Kovsies (University of the Free State), UKZN (University of Kwazulu-Natal)
