Hockey with Casey Eastham

Just when the women’s hockey world thought it was safe to strut back on the turf following the retirement of veteran Australian star striker Nikki Hudson, along comes Casey Eastham.

“At training, we attackers like setting up intercept situations.". Images: Theron Kirkman

A major concern for the Hockeyroos’ rivals is that 20-year-old Eastham already knows what cutthroat international hockey is all about. Intimidation will prove futile – the mid-fielder has quickly chalked-up 40-plus appearances for the national side.With Hudson the last of the “golden era” squad of the 1990s and 2000s which collected two Olympic Gold, two Commonwealth Gold, two World Cups and six Champions Trophies, the pressure’s on Eastham and her fellow youngsters to drag our girls out of the international hockey mire. Currently ranked fifth, their lowest standing in 25 years, the Hockeyroos face their biggest assignment since Beijing in the form of the coveted Women’s Champions Trophy to be played at Sydney’s Olympic Park Hockey Centre between 11-19 July.Eastham and her Hockeyroos team-mates are keen to step out of the shadow of the past era of national success and begin the next Olympic cycle in their long march towards London 2012 glory under coach Frank Murray – himself working in the holy shadow of another Australian hockey doyen, former master mentor Rick Charlesworth.Based in Perth with the Hockeyroos on a routine six-month AIS scholarship, the Illawarra local’s quick between the ears, quick between the sidelines and her maturity has lead to Murray outing her as the future of women’s hockey, claiming she has the potential to one day develop into the world’s best women’s player.The youngest member of the national squad recently let Inside Sport in on the secrets to her success. We left realising why the opposition’s “Farewell Nikki” party is well and truly over.

TURF WARS

“Here in Perth a lot of our training is based on getting the most out of the turf playing surface. Each session [6am-8am every second day] we’ll do what’s called a flow-through drill. It’s a whole-field drill involving build-up play from one end of the field to the other, and then back the other way. It’s one person on the ball in and out of cones. You might do overheads and things like that in the middle of the field, but it’s only involving the person on the ball and the person who’s going to receive it. Then it gets moved on down the field onto the next two.

“That lasts about 15-20 minutes before we split into groups – attackers down one end and defenders down the other. Defenders usually work on hitting over longer distances and attackers more on build-up play from the 25/50, into the circle. Sometimes we shorten it up and just do circle work – short, sharp stuff. We’ll also slog it out in a 10-15-minute game somewhere in there as well.”

WELL-POSITIONED

“At training, we attackers like setting up intercept situations. We try to create game-like scenarios – a defender hitting out and we’re making the intercept and going at the defence as quickly as possible, just to get them on the back foot.“We have principles we work on as well in terms of getting in the right lines and getting out of the lines of the defenders. We take all the principles we’ve learned and combine them. We’ve also been working on presenting and getting the ball off our players. That’s what coach Frank Murray is pushing this year because we’ve always struggled in terms of getting the ball off our players … we’re not too bad at intercepts and those sorts of things. Improving on that linking between the passer and the receiver is a big target for us this year.“All our stick and ball sessions are quite similar, even though they feature different drills, but they’re all based on the same principles: taking the game on, not being so conservative, attackers getting at the defence and defenders hitting through lines and looking for that riskier pass for the bigger reward. All those concepts are put into training and the drills are adjusted accordingly.”

“We’ve made one room a gym-based room.” Images: Theron Kirkman

WORKIN’ OUT

“Each of our gym sessions lasts between 45 minutes to an hour and starts with us having to do max sets of chin-ups and push-ups. Our trainers are hopeful that by the end of our long-term program in 2012 we can get to 30 push-ups and maybe 15 chin-ups. I’m not too bad, but some of the other girls are struggling to get one chin-up done! They might struggle a little bit with that target.“We’re put through plenty of leg work, plenty of squats, we do bench presses, glut blasts and a few core stability exercises. We’ll generally complete three sets of between 6-12 reps, depending on the exercise. We’ll mix between two or three exercises, and then move on to three more and so on. It’s about 10-12  exercises all up, all of about three sets each.“The squats are my least favourite. All us girls complain because we already have hockey legs and hockey butts, and we don’t like making them any bigger. So the trainers always demand we squat heavy weights, just to make us more stumpy-legged!”

MINT CONDITION

“To complement our weights sessions, we do about half an hour’s conditioning work as well. It might be running on Tuesday and spin cycling on Thursday … On the bikes it’s all based on getting our heart rates up as opposed to what speeds we can reach. Some girls up their resistance because they like to actually get a workout, whereas others can’t work with the resistance; they can’t pedal with the resistance and get their heart rates up at the same time.“Sometimes we’ll use the running track near our gym. We’ll run two kilometres – or otherwise we’ll do 800m runs where we do two laps at moderate pace and one lap sprinting, two moderate, one sprinting etc. I’m more of a sprinter. My fitness this year is up from what it’s been over the last couple of years. I’m probably above average in terms of fitness. I’m the quickest in the team – that’s my claim to fame. I just wish I could get some of those slow-twitch fibres and exchange them for some of my fast-twitch fibres.”

HOCKEY HEALTH

“I’ve learned a few food prep and nutrition tricks from the team-mate I’ve been living with the last two years. I actually hate cooking, but these days I’ll go back home to Mum and ask, ‘Mum, why are you doing this?’ My biggest downfall is that I have Coco Pops for breakfast, which – I’ve checked the nutritional information – aren’t too bad compared to some of the other cereals. I can’t stomach anything else. I don’t mind porridge, but I have to have brown sugar and cream on it.“Before the morning stick and ball training session I’ll have a banana and then come back home and have my Coco Pops. For our main meals at home we have what you might call designated meal nights. Sometimes we’ll have a pizza night, or a steak and veg night or stir-fry night. We have burger night as well. It’s all home-made stuff so we know what’s going into it.”

CHANGE OF PLAN

“In the last few years my diet and fitness have changed dramatically. I’ll still – after tournaments and when I’m back home after the six-month stint in Perth – let loose a little bit and eat whatever I want. Generally when we’re in Perth we’re pretty good and we stick to a pretty strict diet – not overly strict, I guess, but we try to eat healthy and do all the right things so that our fitness can take care of itself.“Fitness has always been one of those things I’ve wanted to work on. I find I get really buggered in games compared to everyone else. It’s match fitness more than anything, but in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics that was one of my main goals, to get my fitness up.“After the Olympics we had a really long break. I did my first beep test back with the open NSW group and it was really bad – the worst I’d ever done. But then coming over to Perth about two months later I recorded the best beep test I’d ever done when we returned to training. Once you have achieved your optimum fitness it’s hard to stay at that level. Especially in this program.”

“Improving on the linking between passer and receiver is a big target for us this year.” mage: Theron Kirkman

TIME OFF FOR INJURY 

“Recovering from injury at an elite level is really tough. Sometimes you injure something and you’re waiting for that to heal, then – like in my case when I injured my groin very recently – you hurt something else trying to recover from the previous injury. In the second instance it was my hammy. I was saying to the girls it was so frustrating sitting on the sidelines. I can’t really complain too much, though, because there are girls who have chronic injuries where they’re continually on the sidelines. You feel bad complaining to them when they’ve been sitting out for six months on and off.”

CLUB TIES

“All the Hockeyroos girls’ weekend club sides over here have different coaches who aren’t affiliated with the AIS, so each coach has different principles they like to work on. You play a different style and structure and have different points to concentrate on. It’s often hard to convert from AIS training to your club training because you have to change your style of play to suit, but sometimes it makes a nice change. We have a really good group of girls at our club Westside Wolves at the moment and it’s nice to be associated with people who aren’t full-on into hockey a couple of times a week.”

HOME WORK

“Our house is a big house and a couple of rooms are spare – we don’t have enough furniture to fill it! We’ve made one room a gym-based room. We have a Swiss ball, yoga mats, boxing gloves, weights and so on. It’ll turn into a regular weekly thing for us where we might have a yoga/Pilates/stretching session. We might do some ab work … Depending on the week we’ve had, I might go for an extra run if I haven’t had a club training session. You try to do something as part of your preparation every day, apart from Sunday – that’s downtime.

– James Smith