This Saturday’s match for the Eastern rugby team will be monumental. The Panthers will play arguably the toughest match of the season on the 100th game coached by Eastern head coach Frank Graziano with the Panthers.

The rugby team will host Northern Iowa at 1 p.m. Saturday at Lakeside Rugby Field.

UNI defeated Wisconsin-Milwaukee last week, 24-7, a team the Panthers (5-0) barely squeaked by two weeks ago, with a last-second 29-27 victory.

“Northern Iowa is the best team on our schedule this year,” Graziano said. “We knew that coming into the season that they were the best team on our schedule, in fact, there are some places were we do not match up at all.”

The Panthers will be looking to improve on their scrums this week, something they did not do well with against Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“We are going to work a lot on our scrums,” senior No. 8 Stephanie Militello said. “Get our forwards and our scrums workout. We need to start getting people in rucks and just know where to be and when to be there. We know the plays now we just have to execute them during game days. We’re seeing what we’re doing wrong in the scrums and now we are just trying to practice our focus.”

Helping the Panthers regain their strength in the scrums will be freshman wing Kayla Heal, who will play for the first time since the Sept. 12 match-up against Grand Valley State.

“It’s good to see Kayla running a little bit, back and forth, she doesn’t quite have her gate back,” Graziano said. “You can see a little hitch. In about two days, I think they will have her ready for where she’s cutting and stopping. She’s been fighting that ankle for three weeks. She hurt that in the second game of the year.”

UNI has talented and fast wings and the Panthers will have to play tough team defense to stop the scoring attack.

“We always pride ourselves on our forwards and our team defense,” Militello said. “We always need (sophomore scrum half Narissa Ramirez) to come through and we just need our defense. (Ramirez) has to take care of anything going wrong and get the ball where it needs to go. If our forwards can stop them from scoring and then we just give it to our backs and our backs score, we win.”

Bob Shaughnessy can be reached at 581-7944 or rrshaughnessy@eiu.edu.