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AFTER playing Octopush for nearly 10 years, as well as playing for one of Scotland’s biggest clubs and successfully completing a teaching course, Margaret Coward will now travel to play for the Scottish Ladies Elite team in the Czech Republic at the end of this month.
Mags, from Orkney recently moved to Campbeltown to start teaching a Primary 1 class at Dalintober Primary School and in between making class plans and teaching she still finds time to train.
Many people might not have heard of Octopush before, this is because it is a sport that is still being established round the world, although it has existed for 50 years.
It is known as under water hockey and is played all over the world and was created to keep divers fit when the weather was too cold for them to dive outside and to give them something more to do than just swimming up and down pool lanes to keep fit.
The principals of the game are similar to any other sort of hockey played. It involves up to 10 plays, with six of these players being in the water at any one time.
It is played with a metal puck at the bottom of a swimming pool and the idea of the game is to push the 1.2 kiligramme puck into the opposing team’s goal, which is a three-metre tray.
They use a small stick, the size of a spatula to hit the puck.
Like in American ice hockey, there are people who can be substituted at any time, as well as one person on the puck, one person waiting on a pass, and one or two people breathing so that they can rotate after a pass has been made, although there is no goal-keeper.
The game lasts anything up to 20 minutes each way depending on what tournament is being played.
It is an intense game with constant substitutions and rotations of players who wear basic equipment of a mask, snorkel, fins and a water polo hat. The sport can be played by both sexes.
Mags began playing the sport when she was 12 with the Orkney club, which is one of the biggest in the UK.
Once she left school and went to university she helped to set up and coach the Edinburgh University under water hockey team, and then went on to play with the Aberdeen club.
Both years she played in the university championships and has also played for the under 19s UK team in 2004 at the world championships in New Zealand.
She said: ‘I love swimming, and I like to try new sports so I really enjoyed playing this.
‘Although there is no club here I still have to train. I use the gym and run as much as I can.
‘When I was at uni I was training up to six times a week for up to 2 1/2 hours at a time incorporating a mixture of a game, skills and swimming.’
