Kuwaiti women ready to host

Whereas Kuwait’s males’s nationwide crew has competed in three World Championship tournaments (2018, 2019, 2022), the ladies’s program has but to succeed in that stage, and the Ladies’s Growth Cup introduced itself as a chance for Kuwait to achieve priceless aggressive expertise in opposition to nationwide groups from different smaller ladies’s applications.

“The Kuwait Ice Hockey Federation, they’ve far exceeded expectations,” mentioned Irish Ice Hockey Affiliation President Aaron Guli, one of many architects of the Growth Cup, which debuted with a males’s event in 2017. “It’s prime to backside first-class. They’ve been a giant driving power in getting the primary Ladies’s Growth Cup over the road.”

In 2019, the Kuwaiti ladies’s crew made their worldwide debut on the IIHF Ice Hockey Ladies’s Problem Cup of Asia Division I event. It was not a straightforward introduction to worldwide play (via three video games, Kuwait surrendered 34 targets and scored zero), however it was an necessary first step for the younger program.

One particular incidence of that occasion in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, was that Kuwait had 5 sisters on the roster together with a triplet (see story).

Since then, Kuwait has been hungry for probabilities to develop their athletes and play in opposition to different nations. They’ve held coaching camps in Czechia and Slovenia, and took part in tournaments in Abu Dhabi and Bangkok. This August, three ladies’s groups – two from Kuwait and one from Bahrain – competed within the Kuwait Ice Hockey League Open Championship, a event developed to additional the game within the Gulf area.

“After we go to a different event out of the country, [the players] get extra energy from hockey,” mentioned Kuwait ladies’s program crew chief Laila Alkhbaz. “They know extra gamers, they know different cultures. Once they contact with different groups and different gamers in several nations, they get a brand new expertise in hockey or additionally of their life.”

When the puck drops on the Kuwait Winter Video games Membership’s ice rink to start out the inaugural IIHF Ladies’s Growth Cup on 6 November, Kuwait will probably be joined by nationwide groups from Andorra, Colombia, Eire, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates.

“It is vitally honouring to be the host,” mentioned Alkhbaz. “All of the crew members are very excited to be assembly gamers and groups from completely different nations. They’re working very exhausting with preparations for the event. Our administration are very excited and they’re working very exhausting.”

Alkhbaz has been on the forefront of creating ladies’s hockey in Kuwait for the reason that program was formally launched in 2017. 

“Earlier than we didn’t have a ladies’s crew in Kuwait, solely like a passion. Just a few ladies, they go to the ice rink they usually play. Meshal [Alajmi] is the primary coach to assist the women to make a hockey crew, and this was in 2008. However they didn’t have the cash, they didn’t have the tools, they didn’t get the help from the federal government, so that they cancelled it. After 2017, the Winter Video games Membership determined to make a ladies’s crew they usually collected the women who know hockey, who performed hockey earlier than, and we made a crew.”

In 2018, Alkhbaz attended the IIHF Ladies’s Excessive Efficiency Camp (see story), participating within the Management Growth Program, whereas participant Rawan Albahouh discovered about rising the game within the World Women’ Ice Hockey Weekend section. 

“I discovered that if you work exhausting, you get what you need,” mentioned Alkhbaz. “I felt some difficulties there as a result of it’s my first time to contact with the hockey society. I discovered tips on how to handle my crew, tips on how to be a very good chief… Now I really feel like hockey is a giant a part of my life.”

When not collaborating in tournaments or travelling to different nations for coaching camps, Kuwait’s feminine gamers compete within the Kuwait Ladies’s Ice Hockey League (KWIHL), which was fashioned in 2018. Now in its fifth season, the league consists of 4 groups – the Blue Waves, Gladiators, Diamonds and Wildcats – that play as soon as per week from October to March or April.

The league was nonetheless in its infancy when Kuwait took to the ice on the 2019 IIHF Ice Hockey Ladies’s Problem Cup of Asia Division I. Quick ahead to at present, and the gamers participating within the Growth Cup will include a number of years of expertise of league play. 

Kuwait has made important strides in simply 5 years, launching a ladies’s nationwide crew program and a four-team ladies’s league, and collaborating in IIHF occasions. They are going to return to the Problem Cup of Asia (now known as the IIHF Ice Hockey Ladies’s Asia and Oceania Championship) for the 2023 version in Bangkok in Might as properly. However first, Kuwait will get to cross one other milestone off the checklist – internet hosting not simply an IIHF ladies’s occasion, however the first ever Ladies’s Growth Cup.