It’s Friday and our #FridayFocus comes from our Umpires for Europe programme. Mirjam Wessel, mentor for this group arranged a practical weekend for her mentees!
“During a hot weekend in October, with heat records being broken, we planned the Dutch U4E Exchange weekend. The umpires Rebecca Woodcock from England and Mohammad Qasim Waheed from Norway found their way to Santpoort-Noord in the Netherlands where their mentor Mirjam Wessel lives.
On Friday evening October the 12th they first watched their Breda video.
On Saturday both umpires had matches at hockey club Myra in Amstelveen. On this day we had the Junior District championships at this club, so every match was very important and there were lots of spectators. 21 Matches where played divided over 4 pitches.
Qasim umpired together with Max van der Tol the girls U16 of Athena against Xenios.
Rebecca umpired the boys U18 Hurley against Hoorn with Merijn Goezinne.
After the matches, Qasim and Rebecca got to see some other matches and did some assignments. In the evening we had dinner at a pub in Bloemendaal.
On Sunday Rebecca got to umpire in the Hoofdklasse Ladies Pinoke – Bloemendaal with Lisette Baljon.
Qasim met up with Suzanne Wessel to umpire the Men’s game AMVJ – Maarssen in the Dutch second division. But we first did some sightseeing:
For Qasim it was his second year in the U4E program and he showed great progress from his first year. Rebecca had her first year in the U4E program and is already selected for the UDP program that starts in 2019.
They both had a great weekend in The Netherlands and hopefully, this experience will help them improve themselves even further.”
A proud mentor, Mirjam Wessel