Participation or preparation for Battle of the Nations – which is more difficult for fighters and for captains? HMBIA News decided to find out the truth having put this question to representatives of the HMB community from different countries. Of course, everyone has their own answer and their own methods, but we can highlight something in common. So, here’s what we found out. 

Roosa Järvinen, fighter of the HMB Finland team and captain of the female team Finland:

“Personally, I stress easily. All personal preparations for the trip and for competitions stress me. So I do my best not to stress and fight at my best in BotN. For example, I work mostly night shifts, so I rearrange my job a few weeks before BotN so I can rest properly. 

As captain, I think the most challenging preparations are logistics of the team. How do we transport our armours and fighters? Where do we sleep? This can be very different depending on where BotN is held. The Battle of the Nations 2019 was good. My personal preparations were on point, I did not stress like usual. I came to Serbia believing in myself and in my team, knowing we had been working all year and knowing that we are ready”, confessed Roosa.

Roosa singled out the problems of logistics as the most difficult in preparing the team for the HMB World Championship Battle of the Nations. Bryce Lightbody, the captain of the HMB Australia team agrees with her. According to him, logistics issues are the most stressful topic. 

Bryce Lightbody:

“My most challenging thing is definitely organising all of my team to get over to Europe. Followed very closely by trying to get myself and my armour over there. Excess baggage is a right bastard!

I work alongside the individual team captains to confirm all the travel details of their fighters. It’s a long trip from Australia so a lot can go wrong. Every single year we’ve had fighters lose armour and weapons during the journey.
We also inevitably have last minute drop outs which can leave teams short so I always have to have spares in place”.

According to Bryce, the most pleasant thing after all these travel issues is just entering the list and fighting! 

“The night before BotN is the right time to relax. All my fighters are there with their gear and everybody is ready for the great BotN battles and it is a huge relief. There will always be last minute problems to solve, so the first time I get to relax is once I step into the list. Nothing else to worry about in there, but the fight ahead!”

Our captains do a tremendous job before the tournament and, of course, the fights themselves during the championship  are an opportunity to finally enjoy the result of the tremendous work done. What about training? Without this stage of preparation for the championship, everything else simply would not make sense. Training the HMB team for mass battles is not an easy task either. 

Pawel Kurzak, the fighter and the trainer of the HMB UK team admitted that they had different kind of problems with trainings from year to year:

At the very beginning 2015-2016 the hardest thing was to get the team to train and fight together. The team comprised of fighters from different parts of the country and we didn’t train or fight together much.

2017-2018 it started to be difficult to find good opponents to train against and we lacked a good venue in which to train.

Now we’re only struggling to train for 12vs12 or 30vs30… oh well and now because of the “corona pandemic” we can’t train in large groups at all”. 

As we can see, the main difficulties lie in wait at the stage of preparation for the Championship. Right after these, tough BotN battles follow, and this is the true essence of personal and team reward. 

HMBIA News