Monday
The Monday evening began with a basketball match. Matthijs, aka Michael Jordan, showed his ex basketball skills. And together with Lennert, Iris, Harry, Maaike, Oscar and Michiel, they kept the purple honor high! In the second block, Asterix was well represented in water polo and Tchoukball. Our Tchouckball team managed to win all the matches and reached the finals (which were played on Thursday). This was achieved by implementing a couple of fierce hip movements. In this handball like game, Mirna, Tessa, Stefan, Walter and Bente strived to keep the Asterix name high. With water polo, we performed well. It is a mystery how we manage to prevent Gauls from drowning in this event year after year. Using a couple of polished elbow moves and a proper portion of purple pride, we managed to conquer the powerful waves and opponents. This resulted in us reaching the finals! Despite our energy being completely drained from the previous matches, Nayade (who were in charge of the water polo bit) decided to play the finals over the entire length of the swimming pool, instead of the usual half swimming pool matches. Oscar joined the already battered team. Using his charming powers, he managed to actually get one of the opposing's team member (a female kind mind you) to almost faint! Sadly enough, the Asterix team (consisting of Oscar, Carl, Michiel, Jelle, Frank, Robert and Olaf) ended up having to give the win to the opponent. But we did managed to achieve a strong second place!
Tuesday
Tuesday started with a first win at kanopolo. Second match ended up break even, 2-2. Due to a better goal balance of the other team, we ended up second in our poule. Continuing into gymnastics baseball. It sounds just as difficult as it was. Luckely for us, the other teams had a harder time with the gymnastics bar than we did. After a lot of balancing and scoring points by circling around, we had won everything. Final match was against our direct opponent for the ultimate win. After an exciting match we lost with just a few points behind. Lastly, goalball, blindfolded trowing balls. This was it, the sports we gauls were good at. We made it to the final easily.
Wednesday
During Asterix' regular training on Wednesday five Gauls were ready to do an alternative knotsball training. Mathijs, Oscar, Willem, Maaike and Daan lost their first match agains the hockey players of Don Quichot. Because Asterix was the only team that played with a keeper, we won the other two games and became second in our group. In the second timeslot four Gauls (Daan, Casper, Tom and Lianne) participated in squash. However, they mostly played agains pro tennis and pro squash players, so it was almost impossible to win. At the same time Oscar, Carl, Michiel, Robert, Willem and Harry gave volleyball a shot. Even with a lot of tall people in the team they were not able to win one set. After the sporty part it was time to enjoy the deserved beers at the technoparty in the bar of the sportcentre.
Thursday
We somehow managed to reach the half final of the very difficult assault course. We won the first round because our opponents got injured after a few minutes. We won the second round because the very sportive Tijs participated instead of Carmen. But Tijs was not able to play the half final for us, so we lost. Tijs did win the final with his own team!
Team van Slooten (plus Marissa and Tijs) played a few rounds of unihockey but were not able to get through to the finals. Daan and Marvin reached the final of table tennis, but lost because the tennis association was too strong for them. (But obviously this is unfair: tennis players should not be allowed to participate in any sports involving a racket and a ball
.) For some reason, we Gauls are very good at Goalball (blindfolded making sure a ball does not reach the wall behind you). Like every year, we won! We also reached the final of Tchoukbal, but unfortunately did not win this. At the afterparty, the winners were announced. Surprisingly besides winning Goalball, we also won Gymnastics baseball!
We can look back on a challenging but fun week. Because our athletic bodies are not used to these extreme sports, we ended up with a lot of bruises, muscle aches, sprained wrists and ankles, and even one broken wrist… Fortunately it is Christmas break now: so enough time to recover. We are already looking forward to winning Goalball next year!