14 happy little miss sunshine ladies kicked off our first training weeked May 29th/30th. We arrived at St. Annes to be greeted by gusty winds and light rain, perfect weather for practising our Zone defence which we dissected and spent the day going over. By the time mid day had come around the wind and rain had died, the day turned into a beautiful sunny blissful day. No so good for practising our zone D against the Juniors! In spite of the weather we persevered and played our, at this stage, well rehersed zone. Suprisingly it worked! It achieved what we wanted it to achieve and encouraged lots of throws which led to a few mistakes. Because of this we gained possession of the disc. However having spent most of the day on defence we were not as clued in to offence as we should have been and made lots of individual errors. This resulted in a score line heavily in favour of the very fast, athletic and tall juniors!! To recover from this some of us gathered together for the evening to eat home made pizza, icecream and watch, sing and dance along to the eurovision which we all agreed (including Sinead) was a great visual experience this year...belgian "puppy dog eyes" boy...greece....skaat man...Woppa!!
On Sunday we focused on our 3 offensive plays in 3-4 and again took them apart before piecing them back together. We finished with a game using all of the plays practised and finished on a high after what was a very productive weekend!
June 5/6th provided us with our second training weekend and we had a smaller but still very happy 10 little miss sunshiners. We used our Saturday to go over our plays and practise our stack mark before playing the u23 ladies from 2.30-4.30pm. The game worked in our favour as our week of ultimate was providing us with the calmer offense and better decision making which we had been lacking in previous weeks. We had finally gotten to a stage where we weren't forcing the play to happen, we waited and were patient which resulted in better ultimate from us. The u23 ladies as always worked hard on defence making our job more difficult. As well as that they have started figuring out our defensive strutures which will make future games more difficult for us. I am really looking forward to more games between the 2 teams as I know that both teams will improve with each game. This game was followed by a layout session with a "slip and slide". It was fantastic to see everyone from both teams bite the bullet and give it a go. There were some specatular layouts from Mernagh, Megan and Jen as well as alot of learning the technique from everybody which resulted in less knees knocking the ground first!
Day 2 for LMS was a little less enjoyable with torrential rain from our early 9am start to our early 12pm finish. We did however get a chance to practice our dump and swing and endzone play, both of which are works in progress and will be tested at our next game!
Looking forward to Wednesday already with the possibility of training and a game!! Counting the days to Tour 2....
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