At the invitational this weekend our women struggled with control on offence. Not surprising, just frustrating when I see how much they care and how well they progress at practice. The season isn’t long enough to take much time working this out, so, tick-tock.
Learning has steps, I didn’t see much application of practice skills in game play until 2 weeks ago. Now I am patiently working to bring those skills to competitive games with intensity and opponents without much respect for the team. This process is not simple, even one player at a time. The men are working transitional players from other sports into big game minutes but it’s with tremendous club and international experience in support. The women are working this transition with almost no club experience so it’s a delicate process.
This is Rachael Haunton, one of our rookies and a goalie with a bit of club history. She played as a field player a few weeks ago, after casually mentioning she had done that for a season before being a goalie. Well, this weekend her skill exploded as she gained more playing time each game. Her development is still centred on goaltending as that’s where I expect her the next 3 seasons. For now, she helps at 2m – both ends of the pool.
The 4 pictures above are all women that hadn’t played water polo competitively or in highschool before Queen’s. Here they are, often in the water together, playing varsity sport at a pretty decent level. This is a sport where a participating team has had a player excluded from a game for 2 consecutive events for punching or elbowing an opponent in the head. Learning new skills in that setting adds some complexity.
Over the weekend the women were 0-4 with a loss to UofT, a loss to Carleton and 2 losses to Mac. Caitlin Neapole lead our scoring with 12 of our 21 goals, Rachael added 3. Caitlin gets lots of attention on this blog so I’ll not dwell on that significant percentage of our goals. I will point out that Rachael is playing out based on how well veteran goalie Jess Schnabel is doing. Jess was the goalie with the most saves this weekend and in 4 years has gone from no experience to positional leader.
We’ve got 4 weeks until NCWP finals and I want to see how close we can get to the “2 win weekend” they are picturing.
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