On the weekend of the 23rd-25th September 2022, the U14 A Netball team took part in the annual GSA Netball Tournament, which took place at Condover Hall, Shropshire. Once we arrived at Condover Hall, we tried out some of the activities such as abseiling, lazar-tag and many more. After dinner, we got the privilege of having a talk and Q&A from Ella Bowen, a future England Roses player. The talk was so interesting as she answered many questions from the girls on the trip, giving us tips and advice what it takes to be a professional netballer and how she got to where she is today.

Our first match was against Putney High School who were probably one of the harder oppositions in our pool! Unfortunately, we didn’t quite succeed against them and they ended up winning.  However, we fought back and ended up winning the rest of our matches. Since we won five out of our six matches, we got into the top league (the Trophy League), which is the first time an FHS netball team has got into that league before, so it was a huge achieve for the team.

We had a total of five matches on the last day. Our first match on the Sunday was against Manchester High who we have never played before so we weren’t sure on how they’d play, but we ended up beating them by a fair amount of goals. This was followed by a tough match against Notting Hill and Ealing High School which we only lost by 4 goals. After that, we faced Bolton School which was another challenging game. This match tested our fitness and teamwork, since we had another game against The Maynard School straight afterwards. We all had to push through and keep on working until the whistle blew, and then our games were finished  until the final match to determine our position overall. A while later, we found out that we were playing Putney High School which we knew would be a tough match, since we lost against them on the first day. However, we picked ourselves up and carried on, playing the best we could.

Even though we didn’t win our final match, we knew we played our best and are tremendously happy with our achievements over the weekend. Our overall position was 6th place out of 22 other schools. We learnt how to work as a team together and stay motivated, even when the game isn’t going the way that you want it to go. Overall, this weekend was very successful,  and we are so grateful for the experience and having the opportunity to play against a variety of schools.

Grace, Year 9