It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill off-season training camp.
Members of last year’s Dalhousie women’s basketball team and this year’s recruits spent the first week of September competing, sightseeing, and bonding in Germany.
Head coach Anna Stammberger, who previously lived and competed semi-professionally in Germany, was behind the idea. She says it was something the team had been planning for a long time.
“It took a lot of organization and a lot of fundraising, but we’ve done fundraising for three years and [though] we’ve used those funds for other things, I’ve always tried to save some for this idea,” she said.
Usually, Dal’s varsity teams take road trips to central Canada to diversify whom they compete with. At first, Stammberger was considering the option, and also considered taking the team to Vancouver to train and compete.
“But then I thought, gosh, it’s almost the same price to go to Germany as it is to Vancouver,” she said.
There were several factors incorporated behind the success of the trip. She said her husband organized the finer details, including domestic travel and accommodations.
The women competed in four games against a German team, who Stammberger says is generally of the same caliber as the Tigers. Dal went .500 against their counterparts, losing the first two in Wolfenbüttel but beating the same team twice after traveling to Berlin.
Stammberger, who is entering her sixth year as head coach of the Tigers, believes it was an excellent opportunity for her team to have international competition experience.
“We could probably play with some of the first division teams,” she said. “The top of second division and the bottom of first division is probably where we fit in, but it’s hard to say.”
Though she doesn’t want to take anything away from the German team, Stammberger attributed some of the team’s early losses to jet lag.
“We flew all night so they barely slept [the night before] and then we had a four hour train ride so it was tough.” Stammberger said.
Hollie MacDonald, now in her second year with the Tigers, embraced the experience.
“It was different because they have such a different lifestyle than us, but at the same time we both play the same sport, so that was exciting,” she said.
But competing with international teams wasn’t the only thing coach Stammberger wanted the ladies to take away from being in Europe. She told them the first priority was team-building, the second, education, and the third, basketball.
“That’s unusual,” she said. “Usually the first would be basketball when you go on a road trip and then teambuilding and education. But on this one, the priorities were skewed because it was such a special situation.”
Experiencing the food, rituals, etiquette, and history were all aspects of the team bonding experience. MacDonald, along with her teammate Diedre Alexander, agreed that one of the hardest parts of the trip was their Berlin hostel. Six players were crammed into a room that they described as “slightly bigger than a residence room.”
Nonetheless, Stammberger says the players didn’t complain.
“I think they were pretty wowed,” she said. “They knew they were there to learn and not to just play basketball so they were okay with the historical lectures and new information.”
The team is coming off a decent season, finishing fifth with a 10-10 record in the regular season, but losing in the AUS semifinals to the CIS second-ranked Saint Mary’s Huskies. Stammberger is aware other teams in the AUS were not blessed with an opportunity such as this, so she plans on using this momentum going into preseason games and the regular season.
With the final roster yet to be decided, Stammberger said it was difficult coming choosing who would be attending the trip and who wouldn’t.
“We did what we would normally do for a road trip,” she said. “We made a list of, how we saw it at that point, who the top 12 or 13 players were and took them.”
Stammberger, Macdonald and Alexander agree that the hours spent fundraising and the cost of the trip was all worth it in the end.
“To round out your education you need to experience traveling and living in a different culture,” said Stammberger. “I believe you’re not really, truly educated until you’ve traveled.”
To read a first-hand account of the trip, visit the Dal Athletics website and read the blog posts written by Diedre Alexander.
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