Carrick Ladies crank up pre-season programme

Many of the Carrick players have continued working on their personal fitness regimes since the end of last season, however, the club’s formal pre-season training programme commences on Saturday, July 28 at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown with an 11.30am to 12.30pm fitness slot in the University Sports Hall.

“From what I can gauge, everyone’s looking forward to getting back into action,” said Carrick head coach, Neil McConnell, “and a lot of the girls have already started their personal fitness programmes. Due to the refurbishment of the Carrickfergus Amphitheatre synthetic pitch, we’re running our pre-season programme this year at the University of Ulster and we’re very grateful to them for facilitating us. Our first session at Jordanstown will be a one-hour indoor fitness programme, then we move into twice-weekly evening training. On Mondays we’ll have a two-hour outdoor session from 8pm to 10pm, and on Wednesdays we’re indoors from 7pm to 8, all at Jordanstown. And we’re also aiming to arrange a series of friendly matches each Saturday from August 4.

“We’ll be at Jordanstown until at least the beginning of September when we’ll re-assess our training schedules, depending on progress with the Amphitheatre pitch refurbishment.

“The first matches of the new season will be played on Saturday September 22. Our firsts and seconds are scheduled to play at home to Kilkeel and Ballymena respectively, while our thirds will be away to Parkview.

“I would strongly encourage everyone who’s hoping to secure a place in one of our squads to get onto our pre-season programme sooner rather than later,” he added.

“In addition to any players who may be looking to join us from outside the club, we’re also expecting a sizeable intake from those of last season’s Junior Club players who have reached the eligible age for participating in senior hockey, which is 15. Competition for places is likely to be intense. Our policy has always been to give every player an equal chance of securing a squad position and that hasn’t changed. So, obviously, the sooner everyone joins our pre-season programme, the longer we’ll have to assess them and the more time they’ll have to hone up on their fitness. I really can’t stress this enough.

“We need to concentrate on making thorough preparation over the next eight weeks and this starts promptly on July 28. I know an eight weeks training period sounds fairly long, but, believe me, it isn’t. So there’ll be no soft build-up over the first few sessions and no waiting for stragglers to re-appear from last season. The hard work starts immediately, so get on board now. And there’s very good reason for this. Two of our three UHU league squads won promotion last year. This year we’re looking to go one better by completing a clean sweep.”