Cayman Island Trip

The place might not be cheap, but it sure was fun!!

We were very fortunate to find a lovely spot on AirBnB to rest our heads so for less than the price of a single room in the Holiday Inn we found ourselves in a lovely 4 bedroom villa with far more room than we needed.

Villa Patio View to Pool and Sea

Friday evening we took a ‘stroll’ up to Royal Palms for the tourney kick off party and meet up with a few familiar faces. But with the early start scheduled for the next morning we were grateful of the Public Bus service to get us most of the way home!

Saturday morning showed just how different our Caribbean neighbours are with the tournament starting promptly on schedule at 8am and ending right on time some 11 and a half hours later! The morning session saw the running of the Men’s and Women’s division with the Twins playing with the New York girls, Nephew joining up with Houston and Tonka mainly on refereeing duties. 8 rounds later we took a couple of hours off for lunch with the girls happy in their victory!

New York Ladies with the Jamaican Boost!

The afternoon saw another 7 rounds of more ref’ing the 4 of us teaming up with our friends from Houston for a bit of fun and valuable experience. Thankfully the mixed final was a much easier game to officiate than the Men’s final with New York completing the clean sweep with a tense and exciting victory over Cayman 2-1. A few post tournament beers, a birthday toast to OJ, some pleasant trips down memory lane then home for pizza was about all we could manage after a long, hot and thoroughly enjoyable day. After refereeing in 12 matches and playing 4 rounds the warm jacuzzi at the villa complex was an extremely welcome place to enjoy some late night rum!!

Houston & Jamaica Squad

Sunday allowed us to enjoy a much easier pace, but also saw Nephew continue to move out of his comfort zone and enjoy new experiences! His first flight might have failed to get us off the rock, as we made a quick stop in Mo-Bay before he finally got to walk on foreign soils. With the boat trip and swimming with sting rays soon to be ticked off the bucket list the day started with a challenge that he sadly was not up to – declining the full Irish breakfast and the delight that is black pudding!

Boat soon come…

After an hour’s delay for technical issues and the boat only taking in Sting Ray City (and not Rum Point), the boat trip could have been better, and the greasy kebab would have been much better if the mozzies had not have been eating us a quickly as we ate the food! But that aside the company was amazing and the craic mighty! In spite of the ridiculously early start Monday morning (and a slight run in with the Jamaican taxi driver) we were back on the Rock ready to start the next chapter of the awesome journey that is Jamaican Touch!!!

Check out a couple of videos at the links below

 

On the Pitch

 

Boat Trip

Nearly there Cayman!

We’re still waiting fingers crossed on the Visa Office, but here’s hoping we get the good news soon!

If all goes to plan we are going to be teaming up with our buddies from Houston and doing our bit for Caribbean Touch and Jamaica!!!

Fort Lauderdale Trip and Tourney

We’d like to put a big shout out to the Lads and Lasses at Fort Lauderdale for looking after us and putting on a good tournament.

Tonka got to Ref and add some much needed experience. Laura got to play on one of the FL teams and bag a few tries along the way 🙂

An entertaining tournament saw a combined Washington and New York team beat FL in an exciting final. After the games were finished we headed over to watch the USA Eagles comfortably beat Chile after an enjoyable tailgate session.

Later in the week we got to join in their practise sessions on both Tuesday and Thursday and it was great to train on some nice, real grass! As with all forms of Rugby it is never complete without the beers after, so thanks for the Taco Tuesday and the welcome Guinness at Stouts.

So here’s to meeting up again in Cayman next month and building further on the partnerships that we are forging with both Fort Lauderdale and USA Touch!

St Catherine 7’s Tournament

Tournament on at Red Stripe this Saturday, as per the flyer!

There’s also going to be a few exhibition matches, including a FIT rules Touch match, probably around 3pm.

Cheap entry and cheap beer, lots of Rugby – what more could you ask for!

So come along for the 7’s, the Touch, the sun, the Beer or just for the Craic 🙂

Quick DocuVid

Sadly we didn’t have spare bodies to take pictures or videos when we were playing – not surprising as we didn’t have subs to play either 🙂

Here’s a few comments and clips of how things were going in the camp

Wow, what a weekend that was!!!

Jamaican Touch is now on the map and I think we made an impression 🙂 The six players that made it into the US ran our asses off, kept our heads high and represented with Pride, Guts and Determination!

Day 1 (Friday) was tough, even if we did only have 2 games. Playing in the M35 section against full squads of experienced players it was a fast learning curve for the 5 people that had never played a competitive match, or been on a full sized pitch! Blinds will go down in the record books for getting the first try for Jamaica, but all the players should go down in history for their efforts on the pitch. Although fitness levels were severely tested we never stopped trying, but it was inevitable that naiivety and tiredness crept in towards the end of matches, that led to the score lines being unflattering. 13-3 and 9-3 defeats to Tumeke and Cayman sound a lot worse than they were, one of them was 3-2 at the half with us clearly still in the hunt.

Once the games were over the newbies (Blinds, Skip, Grumpy, Bullit & Chin) spent the rest of the day hiding from the high Florida heat whilst soaking up as much of the atmosphere as they could, watching, studying, admiring and learning from all the games going on around them. Meanwhile Tonka went off to ref a few games and try to remember what to do having not officiated a match in 2 years.

Day 2 got off to an early start with a match against New York at 8 am! NYC brought a huge squad to this Tourney and finished in the top 3 in all categories, winning a couple of them (including ours). I think we rattled their cage by scoring on the games opening drive with our favourite move, so we spent the next 39 and a half minutes on the back foot. They rushed our drives to knock our inexperienced players off their stride and we got little sympathy when they shot early 🙂 Still the defence was much better today and we scrambled hard under seemingly constant pressure to end up 9-1.

An 8-1 loss to Orlando was another strong performance, but a little bit disappointing. By now we had picked up 3 replacements, one of whom had actually played Touch before. The extra players, if anything, threw us off our rhythym and we should have done better.

Our final outing of the tournament was against the 3rd place team from the Mixed Open category – Galaxy San Diego. After a slow and disjointed start we had just got into the match with Skip’s first try when a weather warning was issued with torrential rain and lightning. All teams headed for cover in the nearest bar where instinct took over – the Guinness and Chicken Wings could not be avoided! Once the skies cleared we returned to the pitch to complete a 15 minute 2nd half, but in spite of Skip completing her hat-trick we weren’t quite able to get back into contention ending the game 6-3 down.

I would say the only negatives, or disappointing things for me were:
1. We weren’t able to get one victory under the belts, and
2. We didn’t get time to talk to Mr Walters to give the guys a taste of proper coaching.

There were so many positives that I am immensely proud of how everyone conducted themselves, grew as players and learnt from their experiences.
Blinds, Skip and Tonka all finished on 3 tries with Bullit on 2 and happy to say most of them were proper Touch tries rather than just improvisation.
5 matches with mainly no subs and 5 matches reffed came to just over 6 and a half hours pitch time in 2 days and anyone that knows Touch will understand that was a lot of running, especially for a 46 year old that’s not been getting enough exercise lately. That said I actually felt stronger going home than arriving 🙂

I would have loved it if more people could have seen the finals as the videos never really capture just how fast the matches are, how nice the setting is and how large the defensive gap is – it only has to be a mninimum of 5m remember, the space is at the ref’s discretion!

The presentation ceremony was awesome, especially when the crowd cheered ‘Jamaica, Jamaica..’ as one when we went up to receive our award. Tonka also passed his assessment for reffing so is now a level 2 – something else we have to work on getting more of ye involved! Obviously I can not tell you what went on at the party as it was a tour, but suffice to say it was fun.

Big thanks to OJ, Jean, Chowie and everyone else that helped the weekend go well and made us feel welcome 🙂

As we move into phase 2 of our development we have definitely put down a strong marker to follow. A lot of things are afoot over the next 12 months and here’s hoping the more we grow as an organisation the better we will become at the logistics and the more likely it will be to get Visa’s!

Next up is hopefully Cayman in March so see you there!!!

Orlando here we come!!

The US Visa department has done it’s best to spoil our party, but we shall overcome! Sadly six members of our squad have been denied access to the US and deemed to be flight risks. Although unsubstantiated so I could not swear to this in court, but I believe that one of the determining factors was that the lads didn’t look like rugby players! I guess it will take a while before a lot of Americans understand Rugby, let alone Touch 🙁
At least the rest of us do get to travel even if there are only 7 of us – who needs more than one sub anyway! So with me also helping out with reffing of the tourney this promises to be a tiring, but fun weekend ahead!
I could mention some of the othe hurdles we have faced – delay in wages, lack of sponsorship, kit suppliers lying and looks like that wont be ready and the small matter of us never having played on a full sized pitch, but that would just be moaning. The fact of the matter is that we ARE travelling, we will be representing jamaica and this is the first phase of a long term development plan coming to fruition, so happy days