Summer hols are over and it is back to the action with EFSC

It was great to be back at Oak View School on Saturday for the start of Autumn term at Epping Forest Sportability Club. It was lovely to find out what exciting things people had got up to over the summer holidays.
We then got outside on to the playground for a much needed warm up of jogging and stretching before we launched in to our main sport of the day - hockey!

The hockey started with the kids grabbing a hockey stick and tennis ball each and started moving around the playground dribbling the ball under close control.
They then paired up to practice hitting the ball to each other between cones laid out on the floor. Alan then came up with an exercise called Follow the Pass. In this, each child was stood next to a cone laid out in a big "circle" around the playground. There is just one ball and the first person moves towards the next person in the circle and passes the ball to them. They then follow the pass and take that players position at that cone. The next person then takes the ball and moves towards the next cone and so on. This was they are practicing passing the ball while on the move.

Next up, the group split in to four to practice dribbling around cones then shooting at a goal, marked out by cones at the far end of the course. Again, this concentrated on close ball control before stopping and shooting accurately at a target.

After our main break we put all that skills training to good use with a game of hockey. The group split in to two teams and it was a great game with the lead changing hands a number of times. A lot of the kids got on to the score sheet including an end to end attack from Harry, who was probably getting bored of being goalie!

We finished off the session to moving back in to the school hall from some games of Boccia, trying to emulate Team GBs success in the Paralympics. The group split in to two teams once more and we played several games with a decreasing number of hoops to aim for each time. It was the blue team who came out victorious in all three games.

Vikram receiving his prize from Coach Alan

At the end of the session Vikram picked up his prize for correctly picking the winning team in the Euro 2024 sweepstake. It finished just before we broke up for summer (that seems a long time ago!) but unfortunately Vikram was away for our last week. Therefore, Coach Alan presented the prize this week. Vikram was  then also chosen as one of our star performers this week along with Davina. Congratulations to you both!

Davina receiving her award from Alan

Vikram picking up his Star of the Week award