April 29, 2016
Eagles Sevens Squad For Paris
Doug Coil
Mike Friday, Men’s Eagles Sevens Head Coach has selected the squad for the HSBC Paris Sevens May 13-15. Thretton Palamo and Ben Pinkelman return to the squad.
Thretton Palamo performed well at the Las Vegas Inivitational for the USA Falcons and was part of the squad at the Canadian Sevens in Vancouver. Ben Pinkelman needed to focus on completing University requirements and missed the recent Singapore Sevens.
Nate Ebner scored two tries against Portugal in Singapore and showed that he is a candidate to make the Eagles Sevens squad for to Rio 2016. Mike Friday is managing his athletes, as he has used 21 different players in the first eight tournaments of the Series.
The Eagles will fly to London May 6 before traveling to France for the ninth round of the HSBC World Sevens Series in Paris. A week later they will be back in London for the Marriott London Sevens, May 21-22. The USA Falcons squad will head to Paris for the three-day Howard Hinton 7s tournament. The Falcons squad has not yet been chosen.
Mike Friday indicated that “there may well be changes to the squad that comes to London to ensure all get what we need from the two weeks as we build towards Rio. However, we have high expectations of ourselves and expect to be competing both weekends, and are not looking at this as a split tour of performance and development.”
The Eagles are in Pool D at Paris in a Pool with Canada, France and Argentina.They enter the tournament in fifth place in the Series standings.
Mike Friday continued “It’s a tough pool in Paris but nothing that should fear us if we apply ourselves and prepare to the best of our ability. We have shown on a number of occasions if we apply ourselves that we are more than capable of topping this group. It is down to us as a squad to perform and, if we don’t, then we will come unstuck.”
Men’s Eagles Sevens: HSBC Paris Sevens
1. Nate Ebner 2. Ben Pinkelman 3. Danny Barrett 4. Garrett Bender 5. Zack Test 6. Thretton Palamo 7. Folau Niua 8. Maka Unufe 9. Nate Augspurger 10. Madison Hughes (C) 11. Perry Baker 12. Martin Iosefo
Men’s Eagles Sevens: HSBC Paris Sevens
v. Argentina – Friday, May 13 @ 2:28 p.m. ET
v. France – Saturday, May 14 @ 6:20 a.m. ET
v. Canada – Saturday, May 14 @ 9:09 a.m. ET
