Monday 25 March 2013

Broken Hill

Hello again, 

This weeks blog starts with the long and extremely boring drive firstly across the Hay plane spotting emu's then watching the Murray river flow through towns like Gol Gol and Wentworth then finally north across the desert to Broken Hill our first destination.

The roadshow gets into Broken Hill at about 5pm just in time for the boys to prepare themselves for the week ahead. I was partnered up with the head of AFL house Jason Mcpherson, we were taking training with North Broken Hill 1st grade AFL team. I started the session with a 10min dynamic warm up that used the whole body. Jason then took the guys through a range of different AFL drills which was a great learning experience for me as I hadn't done a whole lot of AFL drills. I took note of how Jason coached as he is quite a experience player and coach. He had some interesting ideas in how he liked to coach and it made me think about the way I would do things in the future. To finish our session I took the guys through a few new fitness drills which i made up the week before for my presentation and kept it very specific to they way these guys should be playing. 

The next day I had testing with two of the local high schools where we were out looking for talented young indigenous or multicultural children who could be selected for the GWS squad. I helped run these testing sessions with a few girls from our offices in Sydney and ex Brisbane lions, 3 time premiership winning player Chris Johnson.  The tests we performed were height, weight, age, sex, agility test, standing high jump, running high jump, 40m sprint and a beep test. The kids were all ranging in sporting capabilities but we found a few that might be used in the squad, most were just glad to get out and try something new and not be in class. After out testing we had an Aus Kick sign up day where we set up heaps if different drills and let the children go mad and just hung out and had a kick with them. 

On our last day out at the hill we travelled back down to the Murray river near Gol Gol and went to one last high school for testing where we found a few more young aboriginal kids one in particular who had springs in his shoes, the kid could jump. Then on the road again back to Wagga Wagga, it was a very long trip back. 

From this trip I learned a lot about mentoring. Chris who I spent a lot of time with acted as a mentor and encouraged and talked with all the young indigenous and multicultural children at all the schools we went to. His motivational talks and encouraging attitude really meant a lot to all those he helped. I tried to take on a very similar approach when testing the children as well and I believe I got better as the trip went on.

Thanks for reading Daniel Scroope

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