Girls Trainingsweekend

First weekend of October… it’s getting cold but not cold enough to prevent us to go back in the water !  

A lot of girls just started playing again a few weeks ago, as soon as the pools were open, and were thrilled to join this training camp.
Girls from Epo, Orca, Buwh, Mantis, Zuunse and Zwarte Zwanen showed up for this first edition. 

It has been almost 2 years since the Red Mermaids had the chance to train together : it was time for us to bring the team back together again and also meet the new girls who joined the underwater hockey family since then. 

On Saturday, we were kindly invited to join the training of the Zwaarte Zwanen, in Bruges. A bit of warm-up, a bit of skills, and mostly… a lot of games !  Two women teams and one men team met each other for 10 minutes games during more than 1 hour.

Like always, we needed a bit of time to find each other and play together, but it didn’t take long before we could intuitively find back again our team game:  a lot of us have played together for years and we still know each other’s games, even after not training together for a really (really!) long time. 

Short games means really intensive games (#restingischeating) : we enjoyed the breaks between 2 games to discuss tactics and give advice to some of our newest Mermaids (some of them just started UWH during summer!).
It’s not always easy to play against a men’s team, but we managed to do some great breakthroughs and some good defences in front of our goal. 

One does not simply do a good training without  a drink after that…
We enjoyed a coronaproofed third half-time together before heading each to our stay for the night. Great time to share our memories of previous competitions and also do an improvised tactics session for the beginners (and reminders for the others).  After a good night of rest, we were ready again to go back in the water but, this time, between women only. 

Explaining is good, practicing is better : we took some time to apply the tactics explained the day before. A good exercise for everyone before applying it in matches. 

After 1 hour of games, we could definitely see a big improvement of our game play and also from our newest mermaids compared to the day before. Exhausted but happy, we ended up this weekend with a very positive feeling : the team won promising new Red Mermaids and everyone is really enthousiast to train and play again together in the near future ! 

*Special thanks to Stefanie for organizing this training weekend and offering a place to stay to girls for the night. 

** Special thanks also to the Zwarte Zwanen for the warm welcome and the nice games in their amazing pool !