Tuesday 17 April was D day for the Queensland Netball Tour group. As soon as all 27 girls and 3 teachers (Jenny Wilson, Deborah Lehndorf and Gabby Mackenzie) met at the airport energy was buzzing amongst us all. After having a delayed flight, leading to a late arrival to the Gold Coast, all girls had to get a great sleep to prepare for the theme park filled day to follow. Movie World and Wet’n’Wild held a combination of thrills and relaxation for us all.

Day 2 was our first lot of games against All Saints St. Anglican school. Three great games ending with scores of Senior A winning 26-11, Senior B winning 36-24 and Junior winning 17-14. The next games followed the day after and concluded a great day of shopping at Harbour Town.

After an hour and a half drive down to Brisbane and lightning storms causing a change of venue we finally got to Brigedine College for our second matches. Reduced game times saw our Senior A team draw and the Senior B and Junior teams lose.

Our next day started with a beautiful walk through the Brisbane botanical gardens, and ended with our professional coaching session with Australian netballers Tracey Bruce and Amanda Sheaffe from Queensland High Performance Netball. Here we learnt man on man defending; something us kiwis don’t typically do. It was such a great experience and we all learnt so much! We have all applied these new skills in the first couple of games of our winter season back home.

We explored various sights of Brisbane such as the Brisbane wheel, Mt Coot-tah and Southbank Lagoon. We also participated in an Aboriginal Cultural experience where we were able to learn about the culture, how to throw boomerangs (some of us better than others!), do some of our own aboriginal art and learning a dance. After this we had our rematch with Genesis, whom we played when they came over here for their own netball tour.

It was great to see all of the girls again. These games were well contested and resulted in a close loss for our Senior A’s, a draw for the Senior B’s and a loss for our Juniors.

Following that we had a day at the Koala sanctuary, holding Koalas and hand feeding Kangaroos! Our final game followed with great results with Juniors winning 33-10, Senior B’s winning 20-18 and Senior A’s winning 26-22. We finished off our tour with the Brisbane Anzac Day parade where our patriotism came out when we sang our National Anthem for the Kiwi soldiers as they walked past.

On behalf of all the girls, thank you to anyone who made this trip possible whether it was by sponsoring, contributing to fundraisers, the teachers on the trip or the amazing parents who sent us, we really appreciate it all.