Australian Mens Team Training Camp: Day 2, Wednesday, 24th of November

After having breakfast in the hotel we departed for Eerikkilä, sports training facility about 100 kilometres northwest of Helsinki. Eerikkilä is a great sports facility complete with hotel style accommodation, a great restaurant/dining hall, an indoor swimming pool, an indoor sports court, two artificial turfs for field games; one outdoors and an one indoors, a gym and multiple saunas. It is set in nature surrounded by forest and on the shore of a freshwater lake. Our rooms weren’t ready yet so we had lunch in the dining hall and toured the facilities; some photos of which I have posted below and also more in the gallery.

The bus ride to Eerikkilä.

We were greeted by an Australian flag Eerikkilä.

Our training court at Eerikkilä.

After our rooms were ready and we had settled in we had an afternoon training session which went for two hours followed by a recovery session in the pool. Once this was done it was time for dinner and after that it was time for bed. More posts to come soon.

Bye for now,

Daniel



Australian Mens Floorball Team Training Camp: Day 1, Tuesday, 23rd of November

I arrived in Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in Finland at 1:35pm (local time) after departing on from Heathrow, London earlier that day. I had spent the previous afternoon and evening sightseeing at the Tower of London and hanging out with friends that I had met when I was previously in London at the Astor Hyde Park Hostel. You can see some of my Tower of London photos below and you can see more in the gallery.

After collecting my luggage, a 30 minute bus ride and a short walk I arrived at the at hotel where the team was staying at around 2:45pm. There was nothing scheduled on the team’s itinerary until 5.30pm when we had a team outing. So I got settled in my hotel room and had a short nap to catch up on sleep that I lost having to get up early and get the first Tube service to the airport.

At 5.30 the team gathered in the hotel lobby and departed on our team outing with no one apart from the Grant (the coach) actually knowing where we were going as it was to be a surprise. Actually, not even Grant knew entirely where we were going as he directed us onto a tram which turned out to be going the wrong direction so we had to catch a tram back the other way to get us to our intended destination. As Grant led us on a short walk after alighting the tram our destination dawned on us as it came into view… it was the Hartwall Arena; the stadium that was the main venue for this year’s World Floorball Championships. However, we hadn’t come to the stadium to watch Floorball or even to train Floorball; we had come to watch an ice-hockey match. The match was between two Helsinki based teams Jokerit and Helsinki IFK and was set to be a derby because of the intense rivalry between them. The match felt as though it was one-sided with the home team, Jokerit, holding a 3-0 lead going into the third period. However HIFK dug deep and brought the score back to 3-2. Late in the third period and one goal down HIFK pulled their goalie and sent an extra skater out on the ice. This worked perfectly as they scored the equaliser with less than a minute to go before the full-time buzzer which meant the match was going into overtime. The overtime period was interesting as it is played with each team having only four skaters on the ice. Both teams had their chances however a mistake by one of the HIFK defenders left the puck free infront of their net and Jokerit capitalised to win the match. A big thanks to Michael McCallum who took the photos below and allowed me to use them as I didn’t have my camera on me when we went to the match. More photos can be seen in the gallery.

 

Both the Tower of London and the ice-hockey match were great experiences and it was awesome that I could experience both in such a short space of time.

Bye for now,

Daniel.



My First Training Sessions

After arriving in Umeå one of my first priorities was to get in contact with the Floorball club that I wanted to play for. I had done some research before leaving Australia with the help of my friend Anders Östling (he played for Story Bridge at this year’s AFO) and had decided that a club by the name of Ersboda would be a good choice. I emailed them just before leaving Australia and they emailed me back with a Swedish phone number and telling me to give them a ring when I arrived in Umeå. Fortunately, a new friend lent me an old phone and another new friend gave me a Swedish sim card, I loaded some money onto it and I had a working phone in Sweden. I called the number that they’d sent me and they told me to come along to training the following evening with the Division 1 team. My first impressions… these guys can shoot really hard. A few training sessions later I had the marks to prove it after a shot-blocking drill.

 

The team trained three times a week and the first few sessions were really hard as my fitness left a lot to be desired after a month of travelling and after not really doing anything physical since the AFO. But I stuck with it and after not too long my fitness improved to a more competitive level. We train in the hall of a school named Ersängskolan. Here you can see the hall and the Ersboda women’s team training. More pictures are available in the gallery.

After a few weeks training with the first division team I switched to training with the second division team which is the team I will be playing the whole season with.

Bye for now,

Daniel



The Journey to Sweden

It’s taken me a while but I thought I’d finally do my inaugral blog post here on Gong Floorball about my time in Sweden. This will just be a brief post about my journey to Sweden to get the ball rolling, but don’t worry I have plenty more interesting stuff to post up in the coming weeks.

I left Australia on the 26^th of July and flew with China Airlines to London with a stopover for a few hours in Taipei airport. When I arrived in London with only one night’s accommodation booked but with still 4 weeks before my flights to Sweden so I just sort of made it up as I went along. After four weeks I’d spent a fair bit of time in London, but had also been to Wales, the city of Bath in England, Stonehenge, spent a week in Spain and swum in the Mediterranean. The picture below links to the gallery where there are a selection of photos from my trip.

 



After all the fun and excitement of travelling I finally made my way to Umeå. And from the moment I landed it was clear that my Floorball journey was about to begin.

An advertisement inside Umeå Airport.

Keep an eye on this space as there will be more posts soon.

Bye for now,

Daniel