We Do Adventure

We have a floorball team here in Jajce. That is unusual. Although I'd never heard of the sport until I arrived in this country it's not one of the main sports here. Football undoubtedly claims that prize, although handball, basketball and volleyball would all give it a good run for its money. While floorball may be largely undiscovered here, as it is in the UK, it's huge in Finland. The couple of times I've been there it was the only sport I saw kids playing in the streets, unless you count cycling, which they do a lot of too. When I heard our team had been drawn against a Finnish side in an international floorball tournament hosted in Banja Luka this weekend I was a little concerned. Concerned that we would be on the receiving end of a lesson that our young team might take a little too harshly. There is, after all, no shame in being beaten by people who may have been playing the game longer than some of our team have been alive! I made sure I mentioned this per...

On Saturday Jajce's Lavovi (Lions) bit back at the BiH Floorball League tournament in Tuzla. At least they did in the first game they played. The last time the Lavovi played Gladijator from Prijedor the game was a 4-4 draw. This time we won by a surprisingly comfortable 6-2 margin. Anyone who read our post about the first tournament will probably have noticed the kit change since then. Out go the 70s-style short-shorts of the hand-me-down outfits and in comes a freshly purchased strip with the team badge on the front and “Floorball Club Lavovi Jajce” in big text on the back between the shoulder blades. Sadly new kit and the feel-good factor of getting a first tournament win wasn't enough to guarantee a result in our second game of the day. I never played enough competitive sport in the UK to speak authoritatively on cultural differences but I was surprised that on a day when the lowest scoring game featured six goals our team's faces clearly showed they thoug...

This is Lavovi Jajce (Jajce Lions) all smiles before our first game in the new BiH Floorball League. That's me second from the left. Saturday was the first of four tournament days we'll compete in this year. Hopefully we'll do better at the competing bit next time. We lost a closely fought first match 3:2, with the winning goal coming in the dying seconds. However, for reasons I won't go into here, we for ourselves 2:0 down in about as many minutes at the start of the second game. Our opponents in this game go by the name Gromovi, which translates as Thunder. There's no thunder without lightning, and although they say this never strikes twice we were on the end of a brutal 12:2 thrashing. In the words of Yazz : the only way is up!

Back when I was in my late teens and early twenties "No Fear" was a very cool clothing brand and "No Fear" posters were a must have for any adventure sports enthusiast's bedroom wall. I remember having one of an extreme skier bursting off a cliff edge. "If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space" declared the bold text. A friend had a T-shirt that asserted: "2nd place is the 1st loser." Yesterday, in a bitterly cold sports hall in Fojnica, our floorball team went some way to proving otherwise. We were taking part is a short six-way tournament between teams from Sarajevo and Fojnica. Each club had divided their squad into two. We had Jajce 1, featuring our strongest, fastest, players and Jajce 2, featuring the rest of us! We should have realised things were going to be a bit strange when Jajce 2 recorded a 7-0 win in its first match of the tournament. I think Jajce 1 felt they had to get at least one 8-0 score...

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...

Over the past couple of months we've done a lot of walking: the streets of London, must-see Vancouver, most of Seattle's downtown and the pretty bits of Cape Town. We haven't, however, done much running. I had foolishly thought our pedestrian pavement pounding would be an adequate exercise substitute during our travels. I was wrong. This weekend I was back at floorball training here in Jajce. We have about a dozen, mostly athletic, teenagers who form the core of our team. As well as being committed to training twice a week they often organise running together too. A couple of them also train in handball and football teams. And they are competitive. With a game against a team from Prijedor, a town a couple of hours north of us, just a week away I was rejoining a team focused on delivering a winning performance. Training was intense. I didn't expect it to be otherwise. I just expected to find running a little easier, my recovery times a little shorter. Keeping up ...

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...

In an exciting development for the floorball (aka uni-hockey) team we work with here in Jajce, training now happens indoors. Floorball is intended to be an indoor sport but the team in Jajce had trained outside for years because it wasn't able to hire a hall for practises. Playing outside in snow, ice and freezing temperatures is good for building dedication to the cause but not helpful in honing the finer points of technique. This Sunday was the second of what should be a regular session in Jajce's new sports hall. It has to be said that today you could see your breath inside but at least it wasn't slushy underfoot. Playing on a new, almost perfectly flat, playing surface will definitely sharpen up everyone's skills. This Sunday it showed up mine as somewhat lacking but I'll comfort myself with the knowledge that last week I scored the first goal of the first game of our first session with my first touch...in a game my team went on to lose!

Over the past couple of years I've written a number of posts about uni-hockey. However, I've never posted a photo or a video that shows the game in action. Thankfully, last weekend my brother was on hand to do the honours. This, then, is his first-hand account of his first experience of uni hockey, on his first visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

When I say 'uni-hockey' to people I am often met by blank looks. That's not surprising. Up until relatively recently I'd never heard of it either. Then it turns out it often, perhaps more often, goes by the name floorball. Neverthless, it is still fair to say it's a small, if growing, sport thats main sphere of influence is Scandanavia. As with anything unknow, people find it easier to comprehand when they've actually seen it. And so we've started filming a promotional fim about the team uni-hockey Novi Most has started in Mostar. It was during filming at a training session on Saturday that I shot this quick vlog...