Hi, I’m Louise

Hi.  My name is Louise and I love underwater hockey.

I started to play hockey with my dad and a bunch of his old uni friends after swimming training, back in the days when I lived in South Africa. We started off playing in a dramatically sloping 33m long concrete bottomed pool with the tiles for the lanes stuck on top of the concrete and I remember coming out with bleeding hips, knees, hands and elbows. We played with lead pucks that my dad and I made from old sinkers that he picked up when out diving and enormous sticks reminiscent of the days when they still played hockey two handed. Luckily things have changed a lot since then! I only really started playing proper hockey when I moved to wellington, NZ, in 2001. I was lucky enough to have played 2 southern hemisphere championships for NZ in 2003 and 2005 in Hobart and Durban respectively. Definitely the best place in the world to play hockey in – good pools, lots of pool time, good coaches, good players, good leagues, and good organisation. I really miss coaching the schools team – something which, as a student, I had the luxury to do.

After that, I spent a couple of lazy years playing hockey socially in and around sunny Brisbane with legends such as Kelly Geddes and john bridle, who, if is was lucky, would give me a lift to Surfers or Palm Beach in his lotus. What a luxury. and what a great bunch of hockey players. The Palm Beach post playing hockey in thunderstorms BBQ’s are sorely missed.

I’m currently living in a very cold, grey and rainy London and playing with west London (second best team in the UK) a couple of times a week, even though the team I play for is the North West Ladies, who are based up somewhere in Sheffield/Manchester/Leeds area (not really too sure about the exact location). We managed to win the National club title a couple of years ago, and will be attempting to beat our arch rivals – South West Ladies – to it this year. I also manage play Euroclubs every year with more or less the same women’s team, and we’ve managed to win it a couple of times in the last 4 years – this year in a very tight 1-0 game against the Dutch women, which we were very pleased with. I was also finally allowed to play with the mighty Amazons in Breda last year, and hopefully they will let me play again this year. Europe is great for providing lots of little local club tournaments to go to, and the hospitality of the hosting clubs is always fantastic. Special mention going to Parma, Argonauta, Seville and Barcelona. I generally play forward on national teams, back in club teams, and have recently been training as a centre with all of the girls hoping to make the GB Women’s Team. I played for them at the 2008 Europeans in Istanbul, the 2009 Worlds in Slovenia – both of which we won – and hope to play for them again in Portugal in August. It would be great to be able to test our skills against the greats of the UWH world – NZ, Australia, Canada, the US, Columbia, and all of the European teams. I really hope that as many hockey playing countries as possible can send their women so we can get things back on track again and have a good, tough competition. After all, what keeps us coming back as much as the game, is the friendships we make along the way with all of the other great athletes we have the opportunity to meet, and the amazing teammates we’d give our left arm for.