After a solid season, finishing third equal in the Christchurch secondary schools' competition, the KHS Girls' Hockey team ventured down south to Cromwell during tournament week to compete in the Jenny McDonald Cup.

This was to be the first tournament that Kaiapoi High School had sent a girls' hockey team to since 1992! 

After a long journey to the beautiful Central Otago and some sightseeing around Lake Dunstan, the tournament kicked off with games against Roncalli College and Cromwell College in the first two days of the tournament. After a hard-fought match and some incredible efforts in the defensive circle, the girls unfortunately went down 1-0 in both of these games. Wednesday saw KHS taking on Middleton Grange, who we had not come across in the 2019 Christchurch secondary schools' competition. This was another hard-fought match with a number of close scoring opportunities and Kaylee McDonald finally nabbing a goal just before halftime, which was enough to secure us the win. Thursday saw the first of our playoff games against Gore High. After playing some dominating hockey, we took the lead early in the first quarter, thanks to a goal from Emma Blackwell, however Gore returned to even the scores in the third quarter. Finishing the game 1-all meant that we had to go to a shootout to take the win and progress to the playoffs for 9th place. I have to give credit to the girls for keeping their composure during this, as even though I was only watching, I was feeling the stress take a couple of years off my life! A goal to Lucy Asher and a standout performance from our goalkeeper Sian Murphy saw us take the win and progress to the top 10 of the tournament. Our final day in Cromwell saw us take on Papanui, the winners of the Canterbury Secondary Schools’ competition. This was another extremely hard-fought game, with the score locked up at 0-0 until the final 5 minutes of the game, where Papanui snuck a goal over the line. This meant that we finished the tournament at 10th place. 

As a fresh team who had no experience competing at a tournament at this level, Jan McDonald (our amazing coach) and I are extremely proud of the way that the girls played and represented the school during this week away. It was a great week.

I want to offer a big thank you to Jan for coaching the girls and to Louise Trowbridge for spending the week with us as our umpire (and for dishing out her first card during a match). Bring on 2020!

Sam Creed - TIC Hockey