Last week, we saw our two Croatian coaches, Tomislav and Goran Jamicic take us through the Nordic Caravan. This week, our two new English coaches, Josh Netherwood and Matt Anderson will send us updates on where the Caravan is and how they’re spreading some of that hockey Magic!
Nordic Caravan-Lund, Sweden
Friday 27th June in Lund, Sweden brought the coaches and the players a blistering hot day. The day started with a diluted version of the game “British Bull Dogs” as a warm up exercise. Next a dribbling exercise was performed whereby the players had to avoid one another in the semi-circle, which was later progressed into a game of invasion- which coincidentally brought out the competitive side of the players. Later we taught the children how to perform basic skills such as the V-Drag, hitting and passing, where they developed the sequence of movements very quickly. Then we progressed these techniques into a shooting exercise where the children enjoyed the feeling of scoring. This certainly brought about a lot of smiles throughout the group.
Once ability levels were established the more experienced players were taken to one side to practise reverse hitting, which was very exciting for all the kids. After that it was time for Hockey Magic: this time we encouraged the children to reveal their creative side by coming up with tricks and mastering some of our own.
We then had a session of ‘tennis hockey’ where all skills were put to the test and on display. Again the more experienced children were very keen to progress onto the aerial technique where a lot of which got the pattern of movements very easily. During this time the younger children were enchanted with the new game they had learnt, with the most common phase of the day being “let’s play bulldogs again”.
The group then enjoyed a one hour break, where a very kind pizza delivery man brought the group of 17 a pizza each which went down a treat.
Throughout the second half of the day the emphasis was placed on the coaching side of things, with an attempt to inspire and guide new coaches to hopefully carry on the good work the Nordic Caravan has already produced. During the session, our main goal was to instill confidence in the young coaches so that they could conduct a drill effectively. All the young coaches thrived on the challenge and used all the information given to them and successfully informed players about the activity and also imposed questions on the players to why they were doing the drill in relation to a game like situation.
Finally we ended the day with a competitive game, where all the new skills came into play. They did not fail to impress us with the amount of information and techniques they remembered!
Source: Josh Netherwood