AFL Session

Toko and I got ready to go to AFL with Mrs Nua’s class because we had Kapa Haka when it was our classes turn to go to AFL. So we lined up with Mrs Nua’s class and walked towards where our session was going to be held. Once we got there we sat down with a bunch of little kids who were ready for their session also. I saw two men walk up to us and said ”Hi Guys” and we all responded with”Hi”.One of them said that their name was Michael and the other said his name was Sam.

Once we were done introducing ourselves we got onto learning how to drop punt. The mentors yelled out “Grab a partner and what I want you to do is practise doing a drop punt”. They both demonstrated what the drop punt looked like and they sent us out to practise. My partner was Toko and we started getting the hang of drop punting even though the kicks went crooked. As we kept practising I started looking at other peoples kicks and they were really accurate. It was about 10 minutes since we had been asked to practise, so Michael and Sam blew a whistle and yelled “Come in”, so we all rushed in to listen to what we were going to do next.

The next thing we were going to do was to learn how to pass the ball with your hand. That technique was called handball. The instructors said to us “With your partner you are going to practise the hand ball”. But first they did another demonstration of how to do it. So Toko and I rose from the floor and started to do the handball. Our attempts were not very successful and our ball went flying everywhere, almost hitting everyone in sight. But as we practised and practised we got better at it. Once Toko and I started to have fun because we finally learned how to handball accurately the mentors blew the whistle and called us in.

Once we were all gathered round them,they announced that it was time for a game. Quietly I said to myself “Finally something really fun”. But they explained that it wasn't the actual game of AFL but it was something that improved kicking accuracy. The game was kind of like force back but if you had the ball you could bomb the ball high and if the opposition didn’t catch it then your team would gain 1 point. They also explained the rules and once they had finished we started the game with a simple blow of the whistle. Once the game began I looked for any ball in the air. There was one ball that went really high so I yelled at the top of my lungs “MY BALL!!!!” and miraculously caught the ball in mid-air. The game went on and I had caught about 5 balls, I was like a viper searching for his prey. But fun came to an end when they blew the whistle and told us to come in. By the way our team won 9 points to 10.

That was it we had finished our AFL session for the week. I was sad that it had come to an end and I wanted to keep on going but other people hadn’t had their turn to have loads of fun. I cannot wait until we go back next week. So we headed back to class and I hoped that the next class that went to AFL would have a wonderful time just like us.