Water Polo Tour Report

Under 14 ‘A’ Waterpolo Tour to Jeppe High School for Boys (26^th Feb – 28th Feb)

3am Friday morning on the 26^th of February 2010 and only our Under 14 ‘A’ Waterpolo team was awake at Gibson House. As we packed the bus for the weekend ahead of us, we had an idea of what was awaiting us - our boys had been drawn in Pool ‘C’ along with St. Stithians College, St. Peter’s College, Jeppe High School and Michealhouse College.

Our 1^st match of the tournament was against St. Stithians at 12:40pm Friday. After a long bus trip we arrived at Jeppe with about 40 minutes to spare before our match. Our boys hit the water but were just not at their best. The long trip, waking up at 3am and also most of the boys having given their all at the D & D Gala the night before probably did not help with our first fixture. The boys played well. Unfortunately this match was to set the trend for the tournament with our boys coming to life only in the 2^nd chukka of each match.

We finished the St Stithians match 11-1 with St Stithians scoring the bulk of the goals in the 1^st Chukka. Our next match was against host school Jeppe and just like in the Sat Sthitians match we entered the 2^nd Chukka 1 goal down at (1-0 , the boys came to life again and where able to win the 2^nd chukka (7-0) and the match 7-1.

Saturday morning saw our boys take on St. Peter’s College at 9am. The boys needed the 1^st chukka to wake up and again went into the break trailing 5-0 and again woke up and won the 2^nd chukka 2-0 but it was too little too late and we lost the match 5-2.

With Michealhouse our last pool match, again another loss of 9-3. This meant we went into the playoffs for positions 16^th or 13^th against Parktown Boys School, Grey College and Crawford College (Lonehill). Our 1^st playoff match was against Grey College in what was our best match and one that we shouldn’t have lost at all but due to poor passing and soft shooting we lost the match 4-3. 

On Sunday we took on Parktown for the 15^th – 16^th playoff. As most sports teams know there is always one match in a tour where you really under perform and unfortunately that was our last match. The boys where just run down and tied and really offered up little defence to Parktown who took the match 7-0. 

Our team would like to thank our generous sponsors, namely Meggar Armature Winders and SEC Electrical. Thank you so much for all you did for the side. 

The boys learnt a lot of hard, good lessons from the tournament and will take this knowledge forward into the next tournament we play in October at Grey College in Bloemfontein.  

Mr J.Leach

U14A Coach