SA Polocrosse Championships - August 2009

SA club champs our annual tournament to crown the best club teams for the A, B, C and D divisions across the country started on the weekend of the 8th and 9th of August with play running over the 2 days. This year the competition was held at Noodsberg in Natal and saw 32 teams entered with 8 competing in each division play started on the Saturday at 8 am.

The Saturday managed to get through without too many delays with everyone keen to get to the rugby match. The first games in all the pools were the higher four seeded teams on handicap vs the lower 4 teams on handicap placing teams fairly with chances for the plate or the cup finals after their first games. We had one particularily close game in the A division which saw the Richmond team up against the Rovers team where things were neck and neck the whole game with little separating them, the 6th chukka saw Richmond pull back 3 goals in the final minutes to take things to a sudden death, where unluckily for Richmond after their gutsy fightback the Rovers managed to score the winning goal.

Well obviously the days play left many with a lot to talk about as soon after the triumphant bok game the bar was humming with the usual buzz and jeer that has become a familiar custom at the Noodsberg pub and makes it great for a good party.

Sunday started off early too, things got going at half eight with all the losing freindlies and plate finals getting done before 11 when our AGM then took place, followed sharply by the lower division finals.

This left only the A division final and which was to kick off at 3 o’clock between the Nyati A side ( Trav Timm, Graham and Bruce Maclarty, Celicia and Dawnay Jacobs and Gavin Cocker)  a very young and talented side which holds a lot of promise for our future prospects. They were up against the Umhlali A side ( Gordon Shaw, Henry Harris and Ross Shand, Mark Slevin, Mark Scott and Andrew Heynes) the Highest handicapped and most experienced team in the A division.

The game started off neck and neck with neither team giving the other much room or chance to assert their authority, the scores were always level or had Nyati up by a couple. Nyati headed into the 4th chukka with a 3 goal lead  and things looked to  be heading very much in their favour. However a great chukka by Ross Shand’s section saw them pull it back to evens… which left things very close for the last 2 chukkas. In the second last Umhlali came on with determination and the sections finished that chukka even where they hadn’t before. In the final chukka things were close and eventually in the dying minutes Umhlali managed to take the lead and with some fantastic play extend it to 2 goals, a margin Nyati couldn’t pull back which left Umhlali A the Winners of SA club champs 2009.

During the course of the weekend we were also running our inaugural Trickstick championship which would see us crowning our first ever trickstick champions. We ran it during the Saturday and Sunday and kids were marked according to the following points: difficulty, execution, combinations, style, speed, flow, and uniqueness with separate trophies for the girls and the boys, Age was also taken into account as it was hard to have the young 10 and 11 year olds compete against the older kids. This was factored in and our boys champion was Lyle Hewittson a young 11 year old who was really impressive doing tricks that many of the older boys were battling with and coming up with some unique ones of his own, The girls winner was Alice Gilmore an 18 year old from Umvoti who had some great tricks of her own and showed great speed and execution. Runners up were Stephan Harris in the boys who was unlucky in his execution of some of his tricks. Taryn Higgs was our girl runner up who had some great tricks but needed something a bit more different from what everyone else was doing. All in all it went well with our winner receiving a years racquet sponsorship and the trophy and our runners up receiving vouchers.

Lets hope this will pick up and we can look forward to some better and more interesting routines next year,  and remember anyone and everyone can do this, it is freestyle there is no rules or specific tricks or things you have to we actually encourage you to do your own thing and not what everyone else is doing…