National Handball Championships

Well, I just got home from a very busy week full of tests and handball. Monday morning, I had an abrupt return to reality by starting the first day after vacation with a 4 hour history test. I wrote 4 pages about how Europe was the heart of the Cold War, wrote 3 pages about the difficulties in integrating immigrants in France of the 1970’s, and drew a completely random map about the “Spaces of France.” My map was completely ridiculous and I’m expecting 1 or 2 out of 5, but I was proud of my 2 other sections. Then, Monday afternoon, I had a 3 hour math test. It was long and complicated, and I didn’t have time to finish.

Tuesday was a day off, so I mostly just chilled out around the house and prepared for the rest of the week. Wednesday morning, I had a 3 hour physics/chemistry test, which I think went well. So, you might be wondering about all of these tests crammed together into a week. Like, don’t the teachers talk to each other? Yes, they do. This week was our week of grouped tests, meaning we had a test for each subject during the space of a week. It is a practice for the Bac when all of the tests are within a short period of time. For most of the kids in my class, the tests started Wednesday morning and went morning and afternoon each day, the last one being French tomorrow morning. And a quick note while we are on the subject of French, I thought you guys might be interested to hear that I got 15/20, a really good score, on my last French essay test. That was the one where I wrote all about how American writers/speechmakers (like Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Luther King Jr.) helped to establish new freedoms. So anyway, I said “For most of the kids in my class...” so why did I start these tests last Monday? Well, Wednesday afternoon, the school handball team loaded into 2 cars and drove off to National Championships.

The team is me, three other girls in my class, my host sister, and 3 other seniors. We played three games earlier this year to qualify for the national tournament, which was this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The tournament was the best school handball teams from Catholic schools. At first, this seems like it would be easier than playing against all of the public schools too, right? Since there are less catholic schools? Well, not really. This tournament is actually harder because the “Sport Étude”(Sport Study) schools are allowed to participate, and they are forbidden to participate in the other tournament. Sport Étude is schools where instead of being in Science track, or Language track, ect, the kids choose from middle school to be in Sports track. They do about 10 hours of intense sports each week during the school day. So you can imagine, these kids have been playing handball together and having many hours of training together since they were in middle school. We ended up 3rd place in the tournament, beating out one of these Sport Étude schools in the consolation match, so we were really excited.

So, at first, I thought I was going to be bored at the tournament. I mean, 2 games per day, what else were we going to do. But, it turned out to be very busy. We got there in the late afternoon on Wednesday, having only had 2 hours to drive. One of the schools had come in a bus and driven 11 hours to get there. We checked in to the tournament, got our t-shirts, and then headed off to put our bags in the hotel. The rooms were tiny, like the size of a cruise ship cabin. We could barely fit out suitcases in the room, and to open the door to the bathroom, we had to slide our two beds together. Luckily, we didn’t really end up spending much time in the room. After a few minutes to settle in, we went off for dinner. All of our meals were included in the tournament fees, and we ate at a middle/high school cafeteria where the food was actually pretty good, but the portion sizes were too small for athletes playing two games per day. After dinner, we went to the “Welcome to the tournament” speeches and they did a random draw for the pools. Once the speeches were done, the coaches were to have a quick, 10 minute meeting and then we would be freed. That 10 minutes became 45 minutes, so we were quite pleased when the coaches finally came out and we got to go back to the hotel. Our team had an 8:30 am game the next day, so we went right to bed.

Thursday morning, we rolled out of bed, had yummy breakfast at the hotel(fresh baguettes and croissants) and then headed to our game. We lost 15-5, but the team we were playing was really good and ended up getting second place. After our game, we hung around to watch the next few games before heading off to eat lunch at the cafeteria. Since we had early games, our lunch was at 11:20, which actually turned out to be lucky because it meant we were in the process of eating before any of the kids from the school came, and we got first choice on salad and dessert. In the afternoon we won our game by 8 goals, watched a few more games, then headed back to the hotel to relax a bit before dinner. After dinner(this time we were the last ones to eat because our coaches were the last ones out of the meeting, so we didn’t even get dessert) we went to explore the town. The main square was completely empty. As in not one living soul moved as we drove through the streets. Eventually, our coach went into a bar and asked if there was a creperie in town, so we went there. It turned out to be this adorable little family owned creperie. The menus were just printed papers slid into pages protectors, but the covers were hand-decorated and there were little clip on butterflies and ladybugs on the front. The woman took our order while her husband made the crepes and their grandson ran around the restaurant until his mom came to pick him up. Since we were basically the only people in the restaurant, once our order had been filled, the woman came to socialize and ask us where we were from and stuff. The crepes were delicious, too. I got a crepe filled with salted caramel and it was just amazing. I was sorely tempted by the crepe filled with a scoop of coffee ice cream and homemade hot fudge sauce but didn’t think it would be very good for my handball playing the next day. Once back at the hotel, it was time for bed and relaxation as we prepared for another day of tough competition.

Our very first game in our awesome blue jerseys. Actually, I liked the blue uniforms the best, but since we lost both games we played in blue and won the 3 games we played in green, my teammates preferred the green.

Friday morning, our game was at 11:30, so we got to sleep in longer. We got up at the same time we had started out game the day before. And we played at the same time we had eaten lunch the day before. We won our morning game, putting us in second place in our pool and qualifying us for the semi-final that afternoon. After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to shower(since we hadn’t had time to do it before lunch) and then left again to watch the other semi-final. Our semi-final was a bit of a nightmare. One of our best players had gotten hurt that morning, and we were playing the team that ended up winning. The injured girl didn’t really play much, so we had no substitute and got slaughtered, losing by like 20 goals. But, we knew going in that we didn’t really have much chance, so we just tried to use it as practice. After the game, we headed to dinner, then back to the hotel to crash into bed. That night, the other two teams at the hotel were completely obnoxious and made all kinds of noise. We had an 8:30 am game and needed to sleep, but they were in the hallways, slamming doors, chanting, screaming, running, laughing until past midnight. Even after we went out and asked them to be quiet they wouldn’t stop.

Saturday morning was our final match. It was super intense, and the girl who was injured played the whole game anyway. She got pushed down again and her injured wrist was stepped on, but she played through. By the end of the game, at least three people were on the verge of tears from pain but all battled on. Our coach was really proud of our courage in fighting on and never giving up. In fact, the girl with the injured wrist went to the hospital on Saturday afternoon and it turns out she has a fractured wrist and is in a cast until early june. So, she won a medal with a broken wrist. And she scored at least half of our goals that game. We were losing at halftime, 8-6. But, we pushed through and ended up winning 12-11. We got the ball back with 20 seconds left and as we heard the whole gym start counting down “10, 9, 8...” we could not have been happier to hear that buzzer ring. We showered, watched the finals, got our medals, then loaded into the cars to head home, nurse our bruises, and most of all, sleep. But of course, we had to watch the finals of “The Voice” before going to bed.

Warming up before our 8:30 am 3rd place game. That why the gym is empty. For all of the other games, the teams playing before or after were sitting in all of the chairs on the side, cheering and making noise. Actually, the early games were nice because we could actually hear our coach's advice.

Getting our medals

"The Podium". Us, the winners, and the 2nd place team. Both the winners and the 2nd place team were from the same region, Brétagne, which had a reputation for being really good at handball.

The team: Top row from left to right: Mr. Hachet(he came to cheer and drive us), my PE teacher, me, Camille, Marie, Charlotte(our goalie who is actually a soccer goalie and had played just one handball game before the tournament), our coach. Bottom row: Aimée(Our coach's daughter who plays on our club team but doesn't go to our school so couldn't play with us. She came to support us for the 3rd place game,) Alix, Océane, and Tiphaine.

Well, I don't have room to bring the trophy home even though no one else wanted it. But, I am coming home with an awesome medal. Not bad, actually. In one year, 2 first place medals from Track and a 3rd place national championships medal from handball. Good souvenirs that don't take up much space at all.

So, I now have to catch up on the tests I missed while at the tournament. I have French and english tomorrow, then I have an international French language test on tuesday and Wednesday(to get a life-long certificate stating that I have this certain level of French which can be used when applying for jobs or whatnot), then Thursday is a holiday, and Friday I have my SVT test. So, another busy week. I’ll let you know how it goes.