This year, our players faced a bigger camp, a new coaching setup, and a higher quality of opposition including members of the Mongolian regional squad. The entire camp this year was overseen by former multiple Olympic and World champion, Wang Nan.
The two week camp provided a mixture of fitness, technique and skills training. Each week finished with a team tournament on Saturday with Sundays being outing days on the Shandong Peninsula. The first being a trip to Qing Dao zoo, and the second given over to hiking in the mountains in the morning and playing on the beach in the afternoon, topped off with dinner at the Four Seasons hotel.
Although the weeks proved to be challenging, the general impression among the Chinese coachs was that our returning players were a lot fitter than they had been last year, with the majority of our students coping well with the increased length and intensity of the training, and the stronger quality and greater variety of both their training partners and their playing styles.
Our first time players had a harder time acclimatising to the local training methods, but each of them worked hard over the two weeks and acquitted themselves well.
The WeiHai management were very happy to accommodate us and they expressed a sincere wish that we would continue to visit their facility. The facility is former World Cup venue with a massive well appointed training centre set alongside an excellent 3 Star hotel.