It has been so wonderful to see Eliza embrace and really enjoy AFL this year. She has made some lovely buddies too who she has really enjoyed playing with.
Today the Under 8s girls had an AFL Gala day, a chance for them to go and play some proper games against other clubs and just have fun. It was brilliant. The girls started by doing handstands and cartwheels as warm ups - my boys have never done that. I loved it!
They did a few drills to warm up and then they had their first game. The game is such a different pace to the boys game. The girls are a lot more tentative, hesitant to run. A lot of the natural instincts just didn't seem to be there. But between the first and the last game, the girls grew so much in skill and confidence which was great to see. Eliza did such a wonderful job too with having a go. She also has such a beautiful heart that she saw that teammates didn't have much of the ball so she'd pass it to them so they could go for goals, or have a turn at hand balling and kicking. I was so proud of the way that she played the game.
Here was her first kick at goal. She did score a behind but I loved that she gave it a go and got close.
She also did a great job of defending. Again, quite funny watching the girls play as they would just run to the goal line to defend whenever the opposition got the ball. Wasn't be best way to defend, but they gave it their best go. As the games went on, Eliza started to get the hang of running towards the player.
Here Eliza passed the ball to another team mate so that she felt included too. I really do love the way she sees others and tries to include them.
In the last game, Eliza started to get the hang of playing. She scored quite a few goals in the game and it was great to see her improvement and her confidence increase. I also loved the support from the umpires (who were Auskick people), in particular one of the girls who gave Eliza high fives after her goal or a good play.
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| Kicking a goal |
Such a fun morning.
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