Isabel, Alys and Mary were selected to represent Great Britain at Softball in the U16 European Championships, held in Sardinia this summer.  Months of winter training as well as a gruelling 3 day training camp, preceded the event.  The first few days in Nuoro were spent training; acclimatizing to the Sardinian sun and most importantly bonding as a team. Of the experience, Isabel writes:

“We opened the championships with a convincing 6-0 win against Spain. Some good hitting from Mary enabled me to get home to score the first run of the championship, and then another good hit from Alys helped GB score their second run.

Unfortunately, we lost our next three games against Russia, Italy and the Czech Republic, however we didn’t go down without a fight and learnt lots from playing these more experienced teams. This meant our final game of the round robin stage was against Belgium, with the winners going into the playoff for third/fourth place. In a very close game GB went 1-0 down at the start of the first innings and the score stayed that way until the sixth and final innings where we scored two runs to just beat a much more experienced Belgian side, meaning we were through to the playoff.

In the playoff we faced the Russians, who had beaten us 8-1 earlier in the week and after a closely contested match the Russians pulled away in the final innings to come out on top with a 5-0 win.

GB’s 4th-place finish was the highest result GB ever has in this event, one that’s been running since 2002, and was achieved playing teams with better funding and many more players. We all learnt so much from the experience and had a great deal of fun, most definitely an experience we won’t forget.”