The weekend just been we were in a small town called Acigne in France playing at a competition called the Breizh Cup. The competition was made up of Canada Women and Canada U21 Women, some french club teams and our NZ U21 girls. It was a great weekend for our team to play together and work on a few things. We came away with some great insights and lessons. We scored into the double digits on almost all our games and only conceded 3 goals the whole weekend. And we WON the tournament!
The other exciting thing to happen over the weekend was the Australian Institute of Professional Photography awards. Just before I left NZ I was frantically getting my entries ready and got them to Sydney a day before the cut off date. It was my first time entering the awards and I decided to enter four images into the Illustrative category. I was a little off with my time differences and had planned a couple of weeks back to make sure I could get internet on Saturday night so I could watch the awards. Turns out I was 24hours late and the awards had been Friday night! Whoops. Anyway, a lovely friend of mine had kept an eye out for my images and had emailed me the results. I was super chuffed to hear I had won a Gold, 2x Silvers and a High Professional Standard award. This meant I had earned 4.5 merit points and was only .5 of a point off becoming an Associate with the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP). So super stoked with that first time effort.
Here are two of the images that won! Some of you will notice that the one that won Gold was also the image I’ve been using for my fundraising! It’s still available for purchase on my website if anyone wants to purchase a double Gold award winning print!
Following the Breizh Cup we headed to a familiar place called Ieper. I’ve visited Ieper on all of my five world champs tours, so it’s always special coming back here.
Ypres is an amazing little town in Belgium that hosts a number of excellent Canoe Polo competitions. This is a special town for New Zealanders as it’s the site of the Battle of Passchendaele, in which the British, Canadian, ANZAC, and French forces recaptured the Passchendaele Ridge east of the city at a terrible cost of lives. After months of fighting, this battle resulted in nearly half a million casualties to all sides, and only a few miles of ground won by Allied forces. During the course of the war the town was all but obliterated by the artillery fire. The New Zealand Teams always visit Menin Gate to pay respect to the New Zealand soldiers who valiantly fought and of whom many lost their lives.
We are staying just a 2 minute walk from the centre of town with the Senior Men, U21 Men and U21 Women. So it’s a full house here! Had a rest day yesterday and today we jumped on the water for a 2hour session. The afternoon has been filled with movie watching and chilling out.
Tomorrow we have more training and hopefully, fingers crossed, a sports massage! We will also be visiting the last post at Menin Gate at 8pm with the entire NZ Squad. It’s always a special occasion heading to this. They do the last post everyday at 8pm in this town which is super awesome.
