VOLLEYBALL IN NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Volleyball Tour

On November 20  boys and girls teams from Kew High School flew to New Zealand to play in a five day volleyball tournament.

“I think this tournament will be a challenge for the team. I mean we’re a new team and we’re going overseas so we don’t know how the other teams play. It’s going to be pretty hard,” said Tanaka Nzenza, year 10, before the team left.

This year, the two teams include students from Years 8, 9 and 10 so that more students were able to go.  Tanaka Nzenza was added to the year 9 squad for this tournament.

“I feel a bit of pressure because, being older, I feel like I have to do well and of course because we’re going overseas as a team, people are expecting high things from us. I’m feeling really, really excited though, because I’ve never been overseas to play [volleyball] it’s going to be heaps of fun.”

The mix of ages in the team has meant that it has been hard to learn to play together in such a short time. The year 8 and year 10s going to New Zealand have their own year level training twice a week.

“The New Zealand team is preparing alright, but I think we could be better. We’re only training once a week and we haven’t actually played a proper game together, but hopefully we’ll pick up soon. We’ve only been training together for about a term now,” Tanaka said. 

Tanaka went on to outline the team's ultimate goal to win the tournament and also, " to have a good time and  to be able to learn something from the trip.”

Results just in:

The Kew High girls team played in Division 3, and finished 7th out of 16, managing to win 5 of their 9 games. The boys team played in Division 2, and just missed out on bronze, finishing 4th out of 16. Both teams were very happy with their performance in the tournament.

 April Austen

Year 10 Journalism