The New Zealand Women’s Lacrosse Association in conjunction with the High Performance Programme is pleased to announce the launch of its youngest national representative team to date, New Zealand U15s. In this inaugural year, the NZ U15s will be selected at the U15 Represenative tournament held in Cambridge on September 13th-14th.
The team squad of 16-20 players will be announced on the day, prior to the final presentations. The NZ U15s will compete in the A division at the U19 tournament the following weekend, Sept 20-21st. The team may compete in one other fixture in 2015. The team will be coached by World Cup 2013 Head Coach, Kari Jones, assisted by World Cup 2013 assistant coach Hilary Eyers and a number of other high performance coaches.
The NZ U15s is the starting point of the ‘High Performance Pathway’ that will introduce advanced lacrosse coaching concepts at the earliest opportunity. It will allow for young talent to be identified, nurtured and where appropriate fast tracked though to national team training camps with experienced national team players.
NZWLA President Hannah Doney commented, “This is an exciting opportunity for New Zealand’s youngest talent. We are pleased to be adding this age group team into our High Performance programme alongside the recently added NZ U23s. This team will enable us to develop the grass roots talent which will feed into the NZ U19s, NZ U23s and eventually into the senior national team, NZBLAX.”
For more information please contact High Performance Director, Jen Hardie – jen.hardie@hotmail.com.