Scotland's top school-aged hockey players are preparing to compete in this weekend's UK School Games, in the first year for hockey at the multi-sports event, held at the University of the West of England in Bristol.
 
Attending alongside Scotland will be Ulster, England and Wales in what will be a competitive tournament. 
Both Scottish squads are also using the event to prepare for their respective European competitions, the boys at the European Championships and the girls at the European Trophy next year.

Boys’ manager Eugene Connolly said: “This event is a great chance to prepare and to build a profile for potential London 2012 and Glasgow 2014 athletes.  This age group is the youngsters who will be representing Scottish Hockey at major international events in the future.”

The UK School Games are set up for elite young British athletes to get experience of attending a major multi-sporting event, similar to the Olympics.  Connolly added: “Just to give you an idea of what this event is set up to do, five athletes that participated at last year’s UK School Games took part in the Beijing Olympics, that’s how good the selection of athletes is.”

Girls’ manager Judith Marshall said: “We’ve put in an U17 squad with a mix of some U16s, whereas England and Ulster have put in U18s, so it will be quite competitive for us.  It will be good practise for the Europeans in Madrid, although we won’t have as strong of a squad as we did in Cardiff (recently at the Home Nations Tournament) as five of our players topped the age group.

There have also been a few call offs as schools are reluctant to release some of the students, this is where a bit of a problem arises as English schools aren’t back yet but we are. Our objective is still to go out and win the tournament.”

Despite being young, a few of the hockey athletes have quite a bit of international experience under their belts, for example Josh Cairns (Azzuri Kelburne) or Louise Fleming (Robert Gordon’s College). But Connolly explained: “This will be a whole new experience for them, focus at a multi-sporting event is totally different to a single sport event and very few, if any, players have experienced that.”