Hockey Wales are pleased to announce the 20 players selected to represent Wales at the Tri-Nations Tournament in Uruguay from 13th – 19th June.
Hannah Cozens, Xenna Hughes, Sarah Jones and Phoebe Richards were unavailable for selection on this occasion.
Following the recent retirement of goalkeeper Rose Thomas, forward Anja Atkin was added into the 26 player senior squad from the sub-senior Dreigiau programme and makes the selected squad after impressing in the recent block of training activity.
Six players will be in line to receive their first caps for Wales at the tournament; Anja Atkin, Amy Cradden, Sophia Crawshay, Lucie Daman, Maisie Riley, Betsan Thomas.
The squad will travel to Uruguay on Friday 9th June, before playing two training matches ahead of the four tournament games against hosts Uruguay and Chile. The two matches against Uruguay will be official sanctioned test matches.
Matches will be live streamed with links to be sent out before the event.
Chile are ranked 14 in the World and in the last year have played in the World Cup and the FIH Nations Cup. Wales currently ranked 24 and Uruguay 25. All 3 teams are currently preparing for their respective continental championships this year so will certainly be a test for our senior women.
Head Coach Kevin Johnson commented:
“There are a lot of things to look forward to as we venture to Uruguay. Somewhere we haven’t been before as a squad against different nations and styles of play, our group very much in transition since the B2022 cycle finished, with 13 players exiting the senior team and being replaced by 9 others ready to make their mark on senior International Hockey and an opportunity to spend a decent amount of time together, after a positive recent training block, to further develop our identity and team dynamic.
With a new group at the start of the next Commonwealth Games cycle, we are very clear in managing our own expectations in the short term and are using this experience to focus on continuing to progress and develop our structures and style of play and expose more players to this level of Hockey and competition to push us into a better place for our European campaign later in the summer.
It is always exciting to be able to reward players with their first International caps and so to have the opportunity to be able to do this multiple times in Uruguay will be memorable!”
