Galaxy Washington DC attend annual Cascais touch tournament in Portugal
Galaxy Washington DC USA held touch coaching with Peter Walters for 3 days in Washington DC September 13 - 15th then headed off to Portugal to play in the annual Cascais touch tournament in Sept 17th 2022.
Training in DC was rained off for Monday training so a whiteboard session was held indoors instead at the impressive St James indoor facility. Nothing like this in the southern hemisphere. A huge facility that has 4 floors of sports surfaces including two full size open ice rinks, football and baseball fields and pitches and 10 gyms Tuesday was a full field session held a km from the whitehouse and covered positions, roles, subsets and defensive systems. A unique occurence happened when during training helicopters started flying overhead, the road traffic all stopped as the lights were recoordinated and nearly 30 large black wagons sped past lights flashing and the US president on board…....Wow. Just 30 metres from our training. One more day of coaching then we flew out to Lisbon, Portugal arriving friday morning. We get vans to Cascais, train on the beach, swim, eat then of to settle into our accommodation. A beautiful dinner and some team bonding fun stuff then hit the sack at midnight.
Saturday is tournament day. A hot sunny day with no wind. The strong french team is held back from attending due to the air strike in France so draw is changed to having the 7 remaining teams playing each other then the top two playing off in the grand final. $1000Euros 1st prize. An 8th game is added to finish the tournament where Galaxy will play an Allstars team selected from all the other teams. Galaxy’s experience sees them go through the tournament undefeated including a 7 - 2 win in the Final and a 5 - 1 win in the Allstar game.
We note the standard of Touch in Portugal has improved. These teams were the top teams from around Portugal mostly ex or current rugby players. Now sending teams way to tournaments to gain higher level experience.
Prizegiving and a shared meal in the evening. An awesome day of Touch. We got to play, to help with some coaching, refereed some games and shared some knowledge and experiences.
Sunday was a day packed with sightseeing, some markets, more meals and a few hours swimming and beach. Monday we head off home. Portugal you were great !!
Thank you Toshi, Trieu, Andre, RK, Jade, Chris, Ian, Pete, Kruize, Tarns, Serge, Charlotte and Kiran.
