Parma is a lovely city a bit south of Milan. It has cheese, it has ham, it has beautiful girls and, since this is Italy, it has beautiful boys. It also has an olympic swimming pool which is very well suited to playing underwater hockey. This very fact prompted about 200 people from all over Europe to come to Parma on Saturday 12 September 2009 to battle for the Parma Cup.

Now this is a bit of a well-kept secret, but USZ has a fledgling underwater hockey section, led by former British national team player Martin Reed. We don't yet have enough players to field a tournament-strength team but we still wanted to compete and Martin pulled in a bunch of friends from other cities and countries in order to get a full team together. The resulting proud Swiss team consisted of: one Englishman, one Romanian, two Germans, two Americans, two Dutch, one Kiwi (New Zealander), one Colombian and one real Swiss person! Our goals were modest: score more than one goal in the tournament and Win The Party.

Our first game against Genk (Belgium) did not go all that badly. We scored an early goal but were unable to keep the advantage and lost 2-1. The second game we played against the French national team under 19. They were very, very good and quite frankly we did not stand a chance. I forgot the final score but it was quite embarrassing.  The French team went on to play in the tournament final which they lost to Dordrecht (Dutch city team).

In the subsequent games we improved our game but were still unable to win a match. This goes to show that in underwater hockey team experience only goes so far: We had two national team captains on our team (New Zealand and Germany) plus a fair number of very experienced players, but all this individual quality does not help a lot against teams that are coordinated and have their tactics figured out. It also did not help that NZ captain Lisa Thompson was recovering from a broken arm and was playing as a southpaw.

In the final game (for 13th/14th place) we met the British Ladies Masters (over 32 years of age) team. This was our best game so far and the teams were evenly matched. We came to 2-2 and then a bad decision by an Italian referee did us in and the British ladies scored 3-2. Our appeals were unsuccessful and that was the final score. Incidentally, because of an oddity in the tournament structure, the team from Genk we played against in the first game ended below us in the final ranking!

Martin Reed & Joëlle Meijer with certificate, Rebecca Rademeyer in between, Jos Visser far right

Fortunately due to the dedicated partying of Joëlle Meijer (NL) we did win the party and that gave us standing invitations to join tournaments in Rome and Ljubljana.

Martin Reed