Men’s Pan Am Youth Blog – Day 7

February 3, 2010

Practise Match Against the Chilean U-17 Team

After watching Aaron’s Aussie comedy last night, today came to us with an early rise at 7:30 am. Preparing for today’s game we ate the routine breakfast consisting of cereal, fruit, eggs, pancakes and omelettes. As everybody nervously got ready for today’s game, we were summoned to Alvin’s room for a team meeting. The room was filled with concentrated and focused young men who were given new tasks and roles to play in the upcoming game. Some of which were a new forward defensive press, a previously played defensive overload and a new limit of no scooping to allow for a surprise in the tournament match.

Coming to the game, we arrived pumped and ready to go seeing as this game is the introductory to what we would see in the tournament. As a team we kicked off the match with a solid first half which lead to a score of 1-1. In the second half of the match, as a unit we came a little unglued and started to have difficulty playing our style of game.

Through out the second half, Chile scored two goals, one of which was a drive to the net on the baseline and the other off a penalty corner.

With the end result of 3-1, any spectator could notice that we were disappointed.

We got back to the hotel refreshed after thinking about the game and went downstairs to have our lunch at “La Fonda”.

After having a couple hours of free time, we had a yoga session with Stacey. The yoga session helped stretch out our fatigued muscles from the game.

Dinner at “La Fonda” was extra filling. After dinner, we headed down to the meeting room and had a video meeting which reflected the good and bad points about the game.

Reflecting on the match versus Chile gave us confidence and we are sure we will be able to show them a new team Canada when we play them.

Brenden Bissett # 11 and Andrew Kanerva # 6
Canadian National Men’s U-17 Field Hockey Team Members