We Do Adventure

On Sunday afternoon we drove just over two hours to Prijedor to play floorball against the team there. Our team, Lavovi Jajce – or Jajce Lions, had comfortably beaten the Prijedor side that visited us earlier this year. We felt the return trip would not be so easy. And so it proved. The game was played with a level of physicality well above anything we reach in our training sessions. Our team are teenagers; Dina, who trains the side is, like me, in her thirties. The Prijedor side seemed to be all late-teens and twenties. For all the fact it was hard fought, it was a fair fight and 4-4 was probably the right result.   Rowan came along for the ride. Standing on the sidelines snapping photos with two cameras she was more often than not winching as one heavy challenge followed another. Floorball is a high-intensity, end-to-end game with rolling substitutions. The three twenty-minute 'thirds' that make up a match equal a lot of running around. Some of our team have yet to gr...

There are good surprises and there are bad surprises. Today we had a bit of both. We had a floorball game arranged for the team I'm involved in training, Lavovi Jajce, against a team from Prijedor, a town about an hour and a half north of us. The bad surprise was the size and age of their team. Bigger and older than ours. Significantly. I wasn't expecting to play, seeing as our team are all teenagers, but they wanted someone to drag the average age up so I was called into action. The pre-match team talk made it clear what Dina, our coach, thought of our chances: "I want you to keep playing, keep trying, even if you are losing fifteen nil!" The good surprise began with going a goal up shortly after the game started. I was playing in what could be described as a right-back kind of role. I was just waiting for some undefendable attack on our goal. It never came. At least it didn't while I was on the pitch. Floorball is one of those rolling-subs games. The three g...