The last Tuesday training session for the season. The weather was excellent, sunny, dry and no wind. Very good turn out of 17 players for training. We had a couple of new faces in Blake and Geordie from the Year 2s training with us and they’ll play for us in the Lightning Carnival. Jared’s brother Matthew who has trained with us several times before will also be a welcome addition to the team on Sunday. The only players missing from training were Caleb and Cambell.
This was definitely the best training session for the year in all areas, skill level, intensity, attitude and behaviour. When you feel good after training you know it’s been a good session.
I was really impressed by the skill level in the first few drills, the handball, kicking and marking was pretty darn good. The group I had – Blake, Dylan and Matthew hardly made a mistake. After the skills we quickly moved to the bump bags and again the group I had – Alex, Matthew, Geordie, Blake and Jared (hope I haven’t missed anyone) executed this drill to perfection.
Tim like last week took the boys through a couple of tackling drills and there was a definite improvement from last week. I do think that the drills are maybe a bit too advanced for the boys at this time but to their credit they’re giving it their best shot.
Tim and I picked two teams for some match practice to finish off training and without bragging too much I’m pretty sure my team won the match easily. Although that was more an indication that we’d picked uneven teams than any great coaching skill on my behalf. The boys loved the match practice as usual especially Matthew, Alex, Jared, Dylan, Blake was on fire, Luke and Jensen. It was great seeing the younger boys such as Matthew, Blake, Geordie and Keiran not being intimidated and really getting stuck into it. One thing that I’ll remember from the session was Kevin kicking his football boot off and it landing on someone’s head and Alex tackling Ethan even though they were both on the same team. The match practice was a good way to bring the team together and get everyone use to each other prior to the lightning carnival. There were a few tears but no one got hurt.
Sadly Luke won’t be available for the lightning carnival so this was his last session for the season – we’ll miss him. At the end of training I thought I’d make a bit of a hero out of myself by racing the team to the goal posts at the opposite end of the oval and back again, but the boys had the last laugh. Although I made it to the goal posts before any of the players when I turned around to run back there was about 12 players who also turned around and were running back (cheaters).
A very enjoyable last training session. I couldn’t be happier with the boys efforts this season and I’m now looking forward to the lightning carnival on Sunday.
PS – Tim would like me to point out that he gave everyone a 50m head start in the run to the goal posts and back and whipped us all. I believe my story sound a lot better with the ommission of this fact.