Floorball was introduced to Singapore in the 90s by Mr Stefan Dahlgren. It is a sport that requires many elements and techniques of running. Floorball and Hockey have a lot of similarities and people often mistake one for the other.
Every year, there will be a Polytechnic-Institute of Technical Education (POL-ITE) Games, just like the name itself, it is a competition where all Polytechnics including joint ITE go against one another to claim the throne.
In 2015, the Singapore Polytechnic girls Floorball team came in the last placing after a tough fight against all the other Polytechnic and ITE teams. With new tactics, a change of how things are usually done and few new sets of players, the 2016 Singapore Polytechnic girls floorball team achieved fourth placing.
RS: Introduce yourselves to the running community!
SP Floorball Girls Team: Hi runners! We are from team SP Floorball and we are a team of 20 players. We are glad and it is a great pleasure to be sharing about our school Floorball team with you here.
RS: What are the key attributes that a player needs to be able to join the Singapore Polytechnic Floorball team?
SP Floorball Girls Team: Everyone may think that having the skills is the key attribute into getting into the team, well we agree on that too but there are other attributes that are even more important than just skills. To us, skills can be learned during training but what is more important is having the commitment and the willingness to learn.
Without these two key attributes and if we just based it on skills, we feel that the team would not be a team but would be an individual “team” instead. Without commitment, it would be hard to get the whole team together during training and in the end, the team would lack chemistry and understanding between one another. Without the willingness to learn, the player and the team would never improve and we would forever be stagnant.
RS: So, can you tell us how do you do your pieces of training?
SP Floorball Girls Team: Of course we would love to! Well since the point of time when the team’s basic skills weren’t really there, our coach decided to focus more on working on our basic skills before proceeding on to other things. No doubt there were people who learned a bit slower than the others but it wasn’t a problem for us. Those that learned faster would teach the slower ones so that everyone will end up at the same pace and learning the same thing together.
We have various real game situation drills and have game time against the boys’ team to allow us to put the drills into a real game situation and it also helps us to be stronger since Floorball is a contact sport, we do not want to be a pushover to the other schools.
We also do various kinds of Physical Training (PT)! From running on our own and clocking our own timing to running at the stadium with the boys’ team to running uphill at different parks (e.g. Kent Ridge Park and etc) and finally kayaking as a team. We sure do a lot of things!
RS: How did you manage to gel up the team?
SP Floorball Girls Team: Well, other than just doing drills to understand a real game situation and doing PT, teamwork and chemistry between players is definitely important. With that, the leaders came up with an idea and decided to have a team training trip to Malaysia to have exposure against other overseas teams and bond the team more. We did various things during our training trip to Penang! From going against the Malaysian teams to hiking in the jungle to fishing to sightseeing to playing laser tag as a team to barbecuing at monkey beach and lastly have our appreciation night.
It was a great training trip! It definitely helped to bond all of us more and we felt even more excited to train when we were back from the training trip though all of us had post trip syndrome.
RS: Can you also tell us how did you guys manage to bounce back from the last placing to fourth?
SP Floorball Girls Team: We definitely know that compared to the other teams, we are falling behind in terms of speed and skills but that doesn’t make us the weaker team. Whereas we compensate the other things with things that most of the other teams don’t do – like we give constant encouragement to our teammates and if one feels like giving up, we’ll push one another to give support and comfort them.
Through this, we realise how much a team can be like a family and we definitely did better each game with everyone always encouraging one another. We may not have been in the top 3 but coming from the last placing to the fourth is still a great achievement for us.
RS: What are some of the greatest challenges the team has faced in this journey?
SP Floorball Girls Team: We think that the greatest challenge that we as a team are facing on this journey and all year round is being able to keep the team together and have the chemistry to play with one another. Everyone must be able to adapt and understand each others’ playing styles in order to be able to play well together on court.
The Singapore Polytechnic girls team will go into action once again in October with a few new sets of players!
