Champs, former Brisbane Bears and Lions player, took the girls through a rigorous training session focusing on basic kicking skills and progressing to smothering and tackling.
General accuracy of the Academy girls kicking has been slowly improving with each session and this session was no exception. After some fast paced warm ups the girls moved straight into some tight kicking drills requiring good accuracy and communication with the rest of the team. This then progressed to some highly contested drills of marking in front and spoiling from behind.
This was probably the first coolish night in Brisbane but it wasn’t long before the girls were working up a sweat. The tackling session that followed, showed that a lot of girls weren’t willing to hold back especially on their own club teammates. Champs went through a few key technical areas of coaching as well as some tactical tackling before the girls were unleashed on each other. All that is, except Sarah Brady who complained of a sore finger, shoulder, hip, head etc etc.
Jenille Pasfield was the star of the session not letting one of her opponents through “the gate” and tackling with such vigour that we were looking around for the first aid kit.
We then moved on to the next session where Champs went through the basics of smothering. When indicating he would demonstrate how to do this, the competitive side of each girl came out with everyone trying to kick it as hard and far as possible (and before Champs could even get there in most cases) as Richard moved down the line one by one. This was a great session for a few of our newer girls as they had never been taught how to smother before. I am expecting to see Nat Thomas of Western Magpies to be topping the smothering stats by the end of the season after this eye-opening session!
Last drill involved kicking out from the backline and shifting the ball from the fat side. It involved the whole group and really tested the girls with their decision making, marking, kicking and fitness. I think a few valuable lessons were learnt from this last session due to a few of the girls losing concentration due to lack of fitness. All the girls have got their fitness programs made up for them so it will be interesting to see how they progress during the season fitness-wise.
A big thank you again to Richard Champion for his help for this month’s session. I’m sure all the girls got a lot out of it and will hopefully take back a few of the drills to their club coaches to start implementing what they are learning here at the Academy.
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