ITEM: Farewell to the first of our players on the Oz team
The following update comes with both a sense of local pride and a reminder of what effort and opportunity can yield.
Our Australian Junior Women's (U18) team player, Ashlie, left this morning for Philadelphia to participate in the AAU Junior Olympics and also in the FIRS World Championships. Later this week, Jordi, who plays for the Aussie Under-12 team will be joining her in Philly.
Jake, who is now part of the National Senior Men's team, will be flying out a little later again, to Dusseldorf in Germany, for the senior world titles to be held 5-12 July.
ITEM: VIC Teams
Only an unofficial update, but it looks like one of our relatively new goalies may have made the State team in his age group. Well done! (We'll name him when it's official).
ITEM: Victorian Championships UPDATE!
Our Masters, Senior A, & Senior B teams travelled to Dandenong over the long weekend to compete in the Inline Hockey Victorian Championships. Some of our junior players hooked up with the Bulldogs teams to play in the 12's & 16's.
Despite coming from different local teams for this one-off event (unlike most of the Melbourne teams who play together weekly) and playing with different rules, our A side only lost one game in the tournament, drawing against the other top teams, and only missing out on the finals due to goal average.
Just as amazing was the B team who were bumped up from BB to BA just for this tournament, but still managed to rake up an impressive result against teams that were clearly far more experienced.
The Juniors who played on secondment to the Bulldogs did an excellent job, with the 12's dominating all the other teams except for the eventual State Champions, and the 16's just missing out in the semi final following extra time and a penalty shoot-out.
The Masters division actually combine Masters and Veterans teams (kind terms for "old" players) and had more entrants than ever before, which is an excellent omen for the Australian Masters Games Inline Hockey competition to be held in Geelong in February 2009. What can I say: at least we weren't the worst team! Seriously, the quickly assembled team did very well against all the other teams showing just how competitive they had become in a very short while, with the key weaknesses being positional, which should be overcome once the players are use to one another - in time for Feb!
Great job everyone!
ITEM: School Presentations
If we haven't got to your primary school yet, we will soon (or call for our instructors to make an appointment). It's your chance to learn about skating & hockey and ask about the game, the equipment, and lots of fun stuff.
ITEM: Bigger is better, we hope. But we need more goalies.
This season we ended up with more teams than we had time-slots, but we still have room for an extra sub on many teams.
But we do need more goalies! We are looking for an extra 20 goalies to help us with our expansion over the next two years. Interested?
ITEM: Inaugural Women's League has started this season
For our first season we have four teams that will be sharing the night, on Mondays, with our C-Grade teams. Something new and exciting for our femmes fatales! Most of the teams have room for one or two players, so join today NO SKILL OR EXPERIENCE REQUIRED, just a desire to have FUN!
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