Success for Rochdale Underwater Hockey Club players in regional championships

North Hotpots

Eleven players from Rochdale Underwater Hockey Club travelled down to Worcester on Saturday 4 March to represent the North in the British Octopush Association Regional Championships.

Freya and Millie competed in the Under 12’s division. Their team came second in their group stage round robin, winning two games and losing the third by one goal.

In the playoffs, they lost the semi-final by one goal and then won the 3rd/4th place game 3-1. Freya and Millie received bronze medals and both scored goals during the tournament.

Nine of Rochdale’s Under 14 players competed together as the Northern Hotpots team. They were Syd, Mason, George, Oliver, Cormac, Adam, Emily, Chloe and Tom.

Their first match was against the other team from the North Region, the Northern Puddings. This was to prove the toughest match of the tournament, after a hard fought, back and forth match, the final score ended up at 2-2.

The rest of the games were relatively easy for both the northern teams, the Hotpots scored 39 goals over the next five games while conceding one.

The Northern Puddings had the same number of points as the Hotpots and had conceded the same number of goals, however “goals for” was needed to split the teams and the Hotpots had out scored the Puddings by 39 to 33.

So the Rochdale players ended up with gold medals after a fantastic tournament.

Top goal scorer was Syd with 15 goals followed by Mason with eight. The two of them were joint MVP (Most Valuable Player), Syd for leading the way with goal scoring and Mason for his strength in defence and executing some brilliant tackles when the opposition looked like they would break through and score.

Underwater Hockey is a fast moving, team based sport played on the bottom of the swimming pool, if anyone is interested in finding out more, you can visit the club page on Rochdale Online.