THE national women’s soccer team have started training session at the Solomon Islands National Institute of Sport (SINIS) as of this week, and they are aiming for ‘Gold’ when it comes to this year’s Pacific Games.
SINIS Strength and Conditioning Coach of Performance Services Team [Portfolio 2], Joachim Rande said it is good to see the women’s national soccer squad attending sessions at the High-Performance centre as they are first undergoing active recovery.
Some of the recovery session tests carried out include ‘sit and reach’ to see how flexible the players are and ‘vertical jump’ to test the lower body strength.
“Also we did 505 agility testing, ‘change of direction’ [COD], how fast you can change your direction within 5 metres,” said Rande.
“Yo-Yo should also be done but then due to the heat of the sun and space inside the facility being fully booked at the moment, we have moved the yo-yo and the 30-metre dash tests to another day when the players come in.”
According to Coach Rande, so far the turn-up has been really good by the National soccer women’s team as a lot of them have turned up. Despite of few challenges in terms of other commitments but the turn-up is around 96 percent seeing them being well organised.
Since starting early this week on Monday, the country’s national soccer women’s team will be returning to SINIS sometime later this week to continue sessions going through general prep, purposely to look into areas of coordination, body movement, flexibility and strength in their body.
“And then we will take them through the general prep at the gym where we will be having general gym sessions which will not be heavy but ‘light’ just to get them into the routine. Then we will start to be more specific and work on different aspects of their game like on speed, power and strength. Sport technical areas like that will come later on after going through the processes,” said Rande.
“Everyone in the PST 2 portfolio is assisting to help out the national women’s team which is good. The athletes are looking forward to returning to training here after a whole year [2022] with all sorts of difficulties in which they are enjoying the environment at SINIS. They are happy to be part of the environment bringing all sports people together. As the coach looking after soccer at SINIS as well, I am very happy to see them come to the High-Performance centre.
“With whatever area to help them train with, I am confident that I can help with their training. Within a few months, they also have upcoming competitions too so we will try our best to mould all the trainings apart from their league and soccer club schedules. And, to be mindful of what we do too inside training routines to avoid injury as the aim is to keep them healthy and fit so that they can perform well in upcoming games.”
National soccer women’s team Coach Batram Suri speaking to SINIS MEDIA with appreciation that his squad is accessing the High-Performance trainings informed that they are mainly preparing for the upcoming Pacific Games to be held in the country later this year.
“Besides that, a few friendlies will come ahead before the Pacific Games. So we are starting preparations here at SINIS, going through testing to find out how we are starting, progressing, and how each individual player’s fitness and other technical areas are during the trainings to be prepared for the mini-games and friendlies that are ahead of us. Hopefully, we will be doing two to three friendlies before the Pacific Games. Our main purpose is to represent Solomon Islands in the upcoming Pacific Games and our aim in these preparations is we want to achieve ‘Gold’ for the country,” said Suri.
Team Captain of Solomon Islands women’s national soccer team, Ileen Pegi expressed appreciation as well to undergo training at SINIS and gave a positive heads-up on the team’s preparation.
“We are very happy to come here at SINIS to prepare ahead for our games. So far so good as all the girls are doing recovery training and testing on our fitness level where we have reached. We hope to improve more in those technical areas. Our main aim and goal for this year is to achieve a “Gold medal” during the upcoming Pacific Games to be hosted in the country as we look forward to the event,” said Pegi.
-SINIS MEDIA
