Brooke, Timmy, Suzy and I started the day with an early morning training session. Knowing we had a 12 hour day visiting various Netball events in the South East made us get out of bed (which is a big task) and get our training done. After we fuelled both the car and our bodies we were ready for the day ahead. First stop was Blaenau Gwent and we received a warm welcome from everyone there on our arrival, especially the people running the event. It was really nice and the children were amazed at how tall Timmy our 6ft6 GS is!!!
We umpired some of the games and got to see a lot of the young talent. Welsh Netball will have to keep their eyes on some of these players for the future! After we had umpired, we went upstairs to speak to some of the children about Netball and invite them along to our next Celtic Dragons home matches. Whilst we were up stairs, we had photos and signed some autographs for our Celtic Dragons fans. It was great to see we have so many supporters!! We had to leave early and unfortunately missed the semi-finals and finals of this event because we had to move on to our next stop. But I would like to say congratulations to all the schools that took part. We were very impressed and Good luck to the two schools representing Blaenau Gwent at the regional Finals in May!!
Next we headed over to Caerphilly, but on route we had a phone call saying the tournament had been cancelled!!!!!! We look forward to going back at the start of May.
We headed on to our third planned event of the day which was being held in Monmouth, and on the way we stopped at Abergavenny town. We took a walk to the castle and through the town, it was very pleasant. It was nice to go there because our import players (Timmy and Brooke) had never been there before, but saying that neither had Suzy or I!!! We went to the market where we bought freshly made welsh cakes- delicious! Timmy and Brooke had their first ever welsh cake and I can definitely say they enjoyed it ….no speaking and big smiles =good food!!!
After we finished looking around Abergavenny we headed over to Monmouth ahead of the event to look around the town. We stopped in some of the little unique shops that are in the town and they had some really cool things in them. On the down side we got caught in the rain, typical Welsh weather!! Poor Timmy and Brooke find it a little colder over here than their home countries; Greneda and New Zealand and the rain doesn’t help! It was time for a hot drink and a little snack to refuel us, because this 12 hour day was starting to take its toll!!! Whilst walking back to the car we made our own fun by coming up with nicknames for each other, mine was Cooca, Timmy’s was Tom Tom, Brookes was Boo Boo and Suzy’s was Su Su! (it was a long day!!)
We arrived at Haberdashers to visit the Wye Valley league and were again greeted with a very warm welcome. We sat and watched the netball which was enjoyable as we hadn’t seen any of the Netball leagues in the Wye Valley before. During the first game we were introduced to two little girls. They were big fans of the Celtic Dragons and they are hoping to come to one of our last home games, they were really sweet. We talked to them about their Netball and passed the ball around; (at the quarter time breaks so we did not detract from the game!!) After the second game, we headed back in the car with our music blasting for the trip home! The day was long but it was worth it!! The girls and I really enjoyed going to all the different places in Wales. I have never had the chance to go and see children playing the game we all love and having so much fun with it too!!! It was a great experience!
