VANCOUVER – The Calgary Dinos women's rugby team made history in Vancouver Friday afternoon by recording its first CIS victory, by a score of 34-10 over the UBC Thunderbirds at Wolfson Field.

"It feels good," said Calgary head coach Simon Chi. "It's obviously something we've worked hard to achieve. I'm really happy for the girls.  They're the ones who did all the work. Our goal this year was to build on each performance so this is a good place to start. It'll probably sink in, in a little bit.  But it's just a game. That's literally the way we treated this."

The Dinos, in their third season of CIS competition, improve to 1-0 after going winless in its first two campaigns, while UBC drops to 0-3 in 2011.

"We didn't front up in the first ten minutes and that cost us so that put us on the back foot," said UBC head coach Lesley McKenzie. "But definitely in the last 20 minutes of the first half and then the middle 10-15 minutes of the second half, we played the kind of rugby we want to be playing. Unfortunately, a couple of individual errors and a couple of mental mistakes are costing us points and then that brings the team down.   That's mental and tactical stuff that we need to work on."

The Dinos scored in spurts against the young Thunderbirds.  After Sylvie Mullen opened the game with a penalty goal in the fifth minute, the Dinos got two quick tries, from Jodie Hicks and Lizzie MacKinnon, to make it 15-0, which proved enough for the victory.

UBC's Paniz Pahlavanlu (Port Moody, B.C.) got her team back into the game with a try in the 31st minute. She scored from just in front of the try line off a quick tap that came after a penalty.

A missed convert made the halftime score 15-5 for the visitors.

Calgary dashed any hopes of a UBC comeback early in the second half with tries from Brynna Walker and Katherine Procyshyn in the 46th and 48th minutes respectively.

Kayla Lissel added one more score in the 63rd minute to make it 34-5 for Calgary before UBC's Megan Hamm (Langley, B.C.), playing with a broken nose, got a try back for the Thunderbirds.

"I keep having to remind myself that this is a super young team and they're learning and sometimes they learn the hard way," said McKenzie. "I'm upset with the way they played because they're better than the way they've been playing. The thing I need to remember is you don't get those mental calluses and you don't get that scar tissue early. You get that as you come into your own as a player in the next two, three, four years that you play varsity."

But McKenzie says there are lots of positives.

"We've been asking some of our strike-runners to get involved in less traditional ways and you saw Tre Holness come through from the blind wing and take it on the outside 40 metres away from where the ball started so that's where we're looking to use the speed of individuals like that," said KcKenzie.  "We're getting good support runs from forwards outside of 12 and 13 and we're looking for strike runners coming from our forwards as well as our backs

UBC will likely need to win its regular season finale on October 15th at Victoria to make the Canada West playoffs. Calgary's next game is also at Victoria. It will take place on Sunday.