This year our national team has got maximum experience participating in different tournaments. Two our fighters and me planned a grand trip to Europe and European tournaments. And we made our plans come true!

In addition to the HMB World Championship “Battle of the Nations”-2014, we participated in a tournament in Austria (Austrian Cup), and attended “Days of Grunwald”-2014 in Poland. It allowed us to compare our skills with skills of other fighters. We also visited the Polish cities of Lodz and Gdansk, where we were able to train with fighters of local teams. For us, it was a nice chance to meet face to face with other fighters.

And we understood that we do some things on a high level, but our team still has a lot of work.

We tested ourselves and brought home new ideas. The “1 vs 1” style of fighting is quite different in our country, so we tried to learn as much as we could. We had to learn new skills and we did that. Probably, we’ll use those techniques at home.

I also took an opportunity to discuss with people from HMB clubs some organizational issues concerning the movement development in their countries. We talked about the structure of clubs, national teams, events holding, fundraising, etc. We still need to work hard on the points back at home. We also learned about new ways of training, understood what we would need to do in the future, and we got some experience to share.

National Team New Zealand is not a frequent guest at foreign events, so the obtained information is important to us. We returned home with confidence that we are competitive on the world stage and are doing well despite our isolation.

As a team we fought very well at “Battle of the Nations” and we are satisfied with our result (16th in the “5 vs 5” category). In addition, our participation has generated a lot of interest here, so we expect to get new fighters. Now we can share our experience and useful information about training and sports in general with novices.

Rob McIntyre, fighter of the National Team New of Zealand