During the July School Holidays, we had four of our U18 North Harbour Girls take off with the New Zealand Youth Women’s Team to compete in the Youth World Champs held in Belgrade, Serbia. The Women’s competition was followed by the Youth Men’s competition in which we had seven North Harbour Boys travel over to represent our country.

Hear below from Darcy, Ava, Sammie and Islay about their experience in Serbia and their lead up to the competition.

Our first World Championship was certainly one to remember!

From playing against world class players from countries such as Spain, Canada and the Netherlands, to bonding with an awesome group of girls from many different clubs within the team. Our team, the NZ Youth girls, had many highlights throughout the tournament which made our experience even more valuable.

After playing three extremely difficult pool games against Spain, Serbia and Croatia we were able to come away with well-earned wins for our team, meaning that we could play off for a spot in the top eight. This play off was extremely important to our team as our biggest goal was to make the top 8.

After a tough game against Canada we were able to come away with a win by one point! This was by far our biggest highlight and achievement at worlds as we had achieved our number 1 goal and became the second NZ water polo team to ever make the top eight!!

We were lucky enough to have a training camp prior to worlds in Eger, Hungary where we gained so much new knowledge and had a lot of fun. One of our favourite opportunities was getting to scrimmage against and train with the U16 National Hungarian team during one of their camps in Eger, Hungary. One of the cool techniques the Hungarian coach did in training was using big inflatable beach balls which were anchored to the bottom of the pool by weights to practice and improve our blocking and leg work. 

Overall this experience was absolutely amazing and all us harbour girls are extremely grateful to be part of this team! We appreciate the support that we had from our Club and its members back home as well as our amazing Parents and harbour boys who were so supportive on the side-lines of our games! 

-       Darcy Spark, Sammie Bentley, Ava Cooper, Islay Martin-Hill

Article added: Tuesday 06 September 2022