It was the first and the best. UAE has so much to offer to both professional and amateur beach volleyball – from luxury and budget front line hotels to the vast beaches and unforgettable tourist attractions. If you are looking to combine a quality training and a game with one of the best cultural experiences this is the place to be!
This year we had a top quality training with professional teams from Austria – Winter/Horl, Wutzl/Fruhbauer, Trummer/Friedl with the head coach from Belgium Bart Jenssen. It was a great deal of new skills, drills and tactics insights. Coordination, balance, agility, ball control. Do you think that training beach volleyball is all about technical skills and tactics? Isnt it what we are used to see on most of practices? Forget. This time we do geography, math and biology.
Pepper a volleyball and name an animal for each letter of the alphabet at the time you hit the ball. Think fast. Don't drop the ball. Ohh, you don't know any animals on earth any more?
Ok, we can't remember any animal starting from K or M. But one would wonder what happened to our simple math skills the minute we stepped on the court? This time we are divided into teams for a warmup sprint rally. The first in line player starts sprinting to the net from the back line when a given simple math calculation results in an even number. Teams are at the start line. The coach gives a math command. You can hear brains working. A command is given: 5+4... Run or not to run? And what exactly happened? Why one team starts running and the others not? Ok, try again. 9-7... Two teams started printing and another not. What happened? Still calculating? Need a phone to add up the numbers? And why exactly the coaches look so amused?
Ok, may be math and rally don't go well together. Surely, math and volleyball will work much better. Pepper the ball with your partner in three touches. Before you hit the ball your partner raises his hand and shows you a simple number. He receives the ball, sets to himself, you show him a number, he adds it up to the previous number and hits the ball back to you. You receive, set, look at the number, add it up the previous cumulative number, hit the ball and go on. At the coach's command you start deducting the numbers: 4+1=5+3=8+4=12+7=19-3=16-5=11-2=9... Very simple math. Any 7 year old kid can do. Can we? What happened all of a sudden to our volleyball? Why the ball is all over place? We can add up the numbers but miss the ball when hitting! Or can hit the ball but cant calculate 7+5. Can we not use our brains at the same time we play the ball? Whatever your verdict at the end but certainly those on court look too bemused by their own concentration and coordination skills :).
All in all it was a great training week. Hard training, plenty of play and endless attempts to score a point against pro players – most resulted in them being more amused and sometimes astonished if the ball landed inside their court :)
{gallery}blog/12-04-2018/gallery1{/gallery}And not only in the court. The challenge continued in apre-training evening table games in the lobby. Be it a Russian game or an Austrain it always ended up in blast of laugher and discovering surprising hidden talents of the players!
One of the bonuses of a beach volleyball holidays is discovering and exploring new places while playing your favourite game. UAE is a small country but it has so much to offer to anybody’s taste. And, of course, we paid a tribute to some of the best places. Few of us jumped a boat to watch the most picturesque dancing fountains in the world from a middle of the lake at the foot of Burj Khalifa. Some managed to reach a dessert in the full dark and speed up over the dunes on a quad bike under a mercy of a magic moonlight. All left with unforgettable experiences and memories to take back home. If only there was more time in that week!
{gallery}blog/12-04-2018/gallery2{/gallery}The week finished with a tournament one wouldn’t want to miss. 1st in the UAE and of its kind in the region – PRO+AM (PROfessional + AMateur) tournament. Read more on that unique event in the next article.
The week had gone so fast so everybody is now looking forward to come back next year. And the camp will happen again next year in February 2019. That time will be more exciting with new format and events. Stay tuned and book early!
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