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