As part of Tasmania’s junior High Performance weekend, Australian coaches Tony Trad and Paul Sfier, Australian players Louise Winchester, Steve Roberts, Anthony Ziade and Nick Good, as well as National Referee Coach Chris Harapa, came to visit and share some of their skills and knowledge with the state coaches and players.
Touch Football Tasmania State Coordinator, Maree Tomlin, said the weekend was a big success, and was a great learning experience for the Tasmanian teams.
“It was awesome. The kids absolutely loved them. The big comment that our kids made was that they are ‘real’. I think they are so far removed from that level of the sport here and they see so little of it.”
“The big comment with Louise was that the girls thought she was fabulous, they kept saying ‘she’s so cool and so real and so down to earth’,” Tomlin said.
Tasmania’s Boys and Girls 12’s, 15’s and 18’s teams attended the camp, as well as some additional development players. And despite a lot of rain across the weekend, there was still plenty to learn. Being indoors provided a great opportunity for the coaches to conduct video analysis sessions with the players and coaches. The group watched footage of touchdowns from previous National Touch League and Trans Tasman tournaments, with the players and coaches given the chance to ask questions about what they saw. The coaches opened up discussion by asking the players and coaches why the touchdown was scored, why the play broke down or what could the defence have done to have stopped the touchdown? This was a great chance for the players and coaches to think outside of the square and it complemented the work they had done earlier that weekend.
Tomlin said that having this high level of coaching was an invaluable opportunity for the sides.
“A lot of kids that we have at that level come from clubs where they don’t have a coach, they have someone’s parents coaching them. So even the kids that have been in the state teams for a few years and come up through different age groups, they used to say ‘I’ll come one day, but I have footy’ now they say ‘I’m not playing footy, I’ll spend the weekend at the camp’ so the kids are prioritising it because they get so much out of it.”
“And the new kids that came along, we had quite a few new ones, it’s amazing how much they improve so quickly because we haven’t hosted our teams, we haven’t trained yet together. Some of the kids didn’t know each other when they got there and just the social side of that weekend, they all bonded really well and they’ve all started to make friends. Now when they go into individual state training sessions, they already know each other and all know each other’s names,” she said.
There was also some theory and practical training for referees, an area that Touch Football Tasmania is experiencing major growth in at the moment. Currently in Devonport, there are so many referees that they can’t all get a game every week. They are now looking at taking some of their junior referees to the Launceston competition each week in order to give everyone a game to referee, as well as to continue their development.
