Northern Rangers Girls 13s star Tahnee Ingram seems confident her side can match it with the countries best Oztag players this weekend at the 2019 Junior Australian Championships.
“I’m playing for Northern Rangers Girls 13s which is half Newcastle, half Tamworth and this will be my third time playing at Nationals, it’s a really good experience to do,” she told Oztag Australia.
“There are a lot of hard teams at Nationals but I think we’re going to go well
“I really like working on my skills and playing against the best Oztag players in the country, it’s so exciting.”
Ingram said there wasn’t a whole lot different between her teammates from Tamworth and Newcastle and after quickly becoming good friends, she thinks her team is ready to match it with the best.
“ACT are probably the hardest competition but we’ve been training on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week and we’ve improved a lot so I think we’ll go well,” she said.
“Our defending needs to be on point if we want to win games. We need to move up in a line and talk to each other all game.
“In attack, when we’re in our red zone we just want to do hit ups and then when we get to the middle of the field we can do some of our plays and then get to our kick.
“We’ve been working on a few plays. X Plus, Arrows and Souths are the three main ones and I think they’ll work this weekend.”
While Ingram and the Rangers are yet to taste Junior Nationals glory, the youngster said she’s spent a lot of time thinking about how good it would feel to win the Australian title on Sunday afternoon.
“It would mean a lot because we’ve put so much time and effort into this, plus we’re all really good friends, so it would be great to share that with the other girls.
“Then when we’re not playing, we need to cheer on all the other Northern Rangers teams, that’s probably the most important thing so that they don’t put their heads down if they do something wrong.”
The 2019 Junior Australian Championships begins in Coffs Harbour on Friday morning.