Switzerland/Germany

A long overdue blog update. So many great things have happened in the past few months. 1) We are now officially training full-time OUTDOORS. The winter depression has passed and now my home is finally Ashbridges Bay again. My beach partner Victoria Altomare and I, train every morning with Steve Anderson and Adriana Bento. As I mentioned previously, Steve is a former coach of Natalie Cook (Olympic Gold and Bronze medalist) and is now our National Team coach. Adriana Bento was a world-class athlete competing internationally for Brazil and now is a stellar coach. In addition to this dynamic duo, Vee (Victoria) and I have our own personal coach, Joe Body (2012 London Olympic Coach). Having all these amazing coaches in our corner has really set us up for success this summer and in the future of our long volleyball career's ahead of us.

Thus far, we have travelled to Locarno, Switzerland to compete in the Suisse COOP National Beach Tour. We placed 5th in this event, after losing a tight match to a stronger and older Spanish team. Next we travelled to both Luebeck and Kiel, Germany to compete in some local events in which we took home 1st place finishes in both! It was a great experience playing so many matches in just two days and pumped us up for the following weekend. We competed in a much larger tournament, part of the SHVV tour in Schilskee, Germany in which we took home a Bronze. We dealt with some harsh weather conditions, training in the pouring rain for 14 days straight, suffered from frost bite one day and then sun burn the next. It only made Victoria and I stronger and pushed us forward as a team.

We're super excited to be back on Canadian soil and to prepare for the Canadian Trials taking place in Toronto, June 25th-27th and the OVA Grandslam June 28th-30th at Ashbridges Bay.
Hope to see you out there!

Namaste,

Julia