Monday night is hockey training night

From October to April, my Monday evenings are spent at hockey training.

It’s a battle against my laziness to get back from work and get changed and go back out in the wet and cold to start training at 8 but I’m always glad I’ve been,

The Chairman has made a smart move this year.  He’s picked the most attractive man from the men’s section and got him to be the coach for the ladies section.   Result – better attended training sessions and hopefully some better results.

Our coach, the lovely Alec, has spotted that one of the problems with the women’s game is that we don’t think about our passing options and always go for the “route 1” – the one the defending team are most likely to have blocked off.

Tonight, we did some 5 on 3 drills to encourage us to think about other options for passing and getting round the back of the defenders.

This is a particularly useful exercise since the rule changes that came into force last season relating to free hits outside the D.

For those of you who don’t know hockey:

When there is an infringement outside the D (the shooting area) you are awarded a free hit 5 yards outside the D.  You used to be able to hammer the ball straight into the D and pray someone was on the end of it or go for the opposition feet and force the penalty/short corner.

Since last season, you are no longer allowed to whack it straight in and the ball has to travel at least 5 yards before it is allowed to enter the D.

This rule change has meant, we have to think about what other options we have rather than the route 1 as we used to.

It worked well tonight once we’d worked out what we were supposed to be doing.  Poor Alec, he has a lot of patience with a group of women who do have a bit of tendency to talk about what we’ve been up to rather than listen to what he’s telling us.

The only problem with training running 8-9.45pm is that I get back at 10pm buzzing with adrenaline and am awake for hours – although those of you who know me will know that isn’t much different to any another night.

Hockey is a great sport and anyone who says it’s a girl’s sport should come and watch our men’s 1st XI play.  The power and skill amazes me.  It’s like I’m watching a different game to the one I play.