Alaska’s Alev Kelter lifts US women’s rugby team to a golden finish for a historic season

With the Olympics looming, Alev Kelter and the U.S. women’s national rugby team put a golden finish on the best season in history, one that will make them medal contenders at the 2020 Tokyo Games.

Kelter, the Eagle River woman who played in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 when women’s sevens made its Olympic debut, was named the MVP in a season-ending championship match Sunday in France.

She scored two tries and booted one conversion to lead the United States past powerhouse New Zealand 26-10 in the gold-medal match of the HSBC World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series finale in Biarritz, France.

It was the first Sevens Series tournament win in history for the U.S. women.

“Hopefully it won’t be our last,” Kelter said in an interview with World Rugby Sevens.

Sunday’s victory propelled the Americans to second place in the world rankings — New Zealand is No. 1 — and marked their fifth medal in six tournaments this season.

Until now, the United States had never finished higher than fifth in the Seven Series rankings and had never won more than two medals of any color in a single season, according to USA Rugby. This season, they won a gold, a silver and three bronzes in six Sevens Series tournaments, and Kelter finished as the seventh-leading scorer -- and tops among Americans -- with 141 points.

All of that will make the Americans one of the teams to beat at next summer’s 12-team tournament at the Tokyo Olympics.

Kelter and her teammates clinched a spot in the Olympics earlier in the Biarritz tournament. That spares them the pressure they faced en route to the 2016 Olympics, when they had to go to a second-chance tournament in order to qualify.

Kelter, a 2009 Chugiak High graduate, scored Sunday’s first try on a long run and later eluded a couple of defenders to score again with 30 seconds left in the half, carrying the United States to a 19-5 lead at the break.

Kelter missed one pool-play match and one medals-round match in the tournament after receiving red cards. She sat out a 27-12 quarterfinal win over Russia but came back to score a try and a conversion in a 24-7 semifinal win over Spain, and then delivered a dominant performance against New Zealand.

“This game is so beautiful because you can go from the lowest of the lows to the highest of the highs,” she said. She said her teammates supported her through it all: “It was nothing but hugs and ‘I believe in you.’ ’’