England Netball | BLOG: Under 19s on tour in Australia

The England U19s are currently on tour in Canberra, based at the Australian Institute of Sport, and will face a number of Australian U19 teams between the 8th – 12th July.

The tour will be a fantastic opportunity for the Young Roses to gain invaluable international experience – for some of the athletes, this will be their first tour with England – and also allow them to put into practise everything they’ve been working on in training and benchmark where they’re at.

They’ll be blogging all their adventures so check back each day for a new update!

Day One – travelling to Australia

Written by Chartie and Zara

We started off at Heathrow on Monday morning with breakfast at Leon followed by a 13 hour flight to Singapore, where we completed some recovery in the roof top pool!

We then had another eight hours flying before stopping in Sydney and then a quick 40 minute flight into Canberra, landing Tuesday night.

We arrived at the AIS around midnight and settled into our pods with everyone very excited to lie horizontally!

Day Two – trying to get over jetlag!

Written by Liv and Emily

We ran yesterday for the first time after being on three different planes for a total of 27 hours.

Our morning session saw us heading to the AIS gym where we did some off-feet conditioning to get our quads, hams and glutes warmed up and less tight after sitting down for such a long time.

We also did some agility exercises to again warm up our legs and get them ready to run again. In the afternoon, we did some straight line running which to majority of us felt like something new because we haven’t run in ages.

Shooters put up some shots whilst everyone else did a variety of static wall work to get us back into the ‘netball mode’.

Overall yesterday was a very chilled day enabling us to get back into the swing of things. We can’t wait to see what else is coming!

Day Three

Written by Beth and Amelia

Day two was our first day training in the AIS Netball centre.

It consisted of a two hour court session where we did predicted change of direction drills to complete the second stage of jet lag recovery.

We then had a quick gym session firing up the muscles to prepare us for the matches ahead.

Straight from the gym we went to the recovery centre where we repaired our muscles in the freezing pool, river rapids and the hot pool.

To finish off the day we had some down time in the evening which we spent at Canberra shopping centre where we looked through the shops and had a team dinner out at Grill’d.

Day Four

Today was our first match day!

We had a light training session in the morning looking at key areas to work on in the match in the afternoon.

We then had our match against ACT state side with everyone getting on court.

It was so nice to be able to play properly as a team and use everything we had learnt.

We came out with a 64-47 win in the end.

Day Five

This morning commenced with a training session focusing on through court attack from live turnover.

We had watched our match video, decided our focus and tried to make our play more clinical.

The afternoon was filled with the second match against ACT, where we performed well, putting our principles practiced earlier in the day into action.

We managed to secure the win with a slightly larger margin than yesterday, happy with our progress but ready to continue pushing on.

We look forward to tomorrow’s training with the Aussie team!