The Valley Hockey Club runs the Valley Hockey Club (VHC) Pre Season Invitational Challenge (the Challenge) usually at the end of February at Burringbar Park.
This initiative is being conducted to provide an organised set of pre season trials for teams preparing for the upcoming season. The plan is to foster relations between clubs from Brisbane as well as from other centres within Queensland. Rather than just having the teams playing various trial games it was decided that it would become a competitive organised competition to actually give teams something to play for over the weekend.
The inaugural event was held 28 February and 1 March 2009 and was very well received by the visiting teams, especially the winning team from the tournament, the Cairns Stingers.
The format is that the 8 invited participating teams will be split into 2 pools where they will play their pool games to decide the positions within the pool. From there a series of crossover games will be played between the pools with the end result that the teams will play off for four trophies. The trophy games will be for the Challenge Shield (1v2), the Challenge Cup (3v4), the Challenge Plate (5v6) and the Challenge Bowl (7v8). The Challenge is played on similar lines to a State Championship but instead of the teams playing “classification” games they play for a trophy.
Teams that accepted our invitations for the inaugural event came from Brisbane, Gold Coast, Toowoomba and Cairns. Each team provided umpires that had a minimum standard of being accredited to officiate in a division 1 game. The Challenge is an annual event with it being important that the tournament is well run, the teams enjoy the competition and the interaction with players from other centres is positive.
This initiative is being conducted to provide an organised set of pre season trials for teams preparing for the upcoming season. The plan is to foster relations between clubs from Brisbane as well as from other centres within Queensland. Rather than just having the teams playing various trial games it was decided that it would become a competitive organised competition to actually give teams something to play for over the weekend.
The inaugural event was held 28 February and 1 March 2009 and was very well received by the visiting teams, especially the winning team from the tournament, the Cairns Stingers.
The format is that the 8 invited participating teams will be split into 2 pools where they will play their pool games to decide the positions within the pool. From there a series of crossover games will be played between the pools with the end result that the teams will play off for four trophies. The trophy games will be for the Challenge Shield (1v2), the Challenge Cup (3v4), the Challenge Plate (5v6) and the Challenge Bowl (7v8). The Challenge is played on similar lines to a State Championship but instead of the teams playing “classification” games they play for a trophy.
Teams that accepted our invitations for the inaugural event came from Brisbane, Gold Coast, Toowoomba and Cairns. Each team provided umpires that had a minimum standard of being accredited to officiate in a division 1 game. The Challenge is an annual event with it being important that the tournament is well run, the teams enjoy the competition and the interaction with players from other centres is positive.
