Our day started off early because we had to meet at the school for 8:15am and our bus was supposed to come at 8:30am. The build up was great because we were all so excited for the tournament. We were waiting for about 20 minutes at the gates of the school, but it turned out that the bus driver went to St. Paul’s N.S. in Navan so we had to go in the teachers’ cars instead! It took us about 35 minutes to get to Gormanston College. We were rushed to get changed and warm up because we were playing in the first match against Longford. It took us a moment to get into the match as best as we could but we played our best in the second half and our work payed off because the final score was 10-0 to us. At this point we were two players down as Katie O’Brien had an injury from the previous weekend and Ellie O’Leary had been sick at the tournament. We had a while to wait for our next match which was against West Meath and the score was 9-1. We played really well and we worked as a team. We had about 2 hours to wait until our next match. This match was against Wexford and we had a big improvement as the score was 13-0. This result meant that we were into the final! The final was against St. Olaf’s from Dublin. The build up to the match was great. We were all making sure we had our starting team ready. Our starting line up was Emma Mulvaney in goals, Eliza Prior at the back, Lauren Richardson
on the left wing, Maya Moran on the right wing and Sofia Sarapaite was up front. All of the girls had a part to do in the match and we worked together as best as we could. We were under a bit of pressure but we continued to score four goals but unfortunately St. Olaf’s scored 2. The second half started and we played really well. We knew that this would determine if we could go to the University of Limerick for the All Ireland Finals or not. From the top, we scored a goal straight away to make it 5-2. St. Olaf’s had scored another two after that but we all played really well for the rest of the match and scored two more goals to make the final score 7-4. We were so happy when the whistle blew because we knew we made it to the All Ireland Finals! We had a great day and are looking forward and training hard for Limerick.
Written by Emma Mulvaney and Lauren Richardson
