In the first edition of Dimma's Diary, first-year Hawk Blake Hardwick talks about his adventures at community camp in Tasmania.
Last week I went on my first community camp with the Hawks, and it was a really good experience.
I flew down to Tassie on the Friday morning, with the guys who didn’t play in the NAB Challenge match the day before, and then we came back on Saturday night.
I was in one of the Hobart groups – it was Birch, Shauny Burgoyne, Cegs, Woody and myself.
On the first day we went and visited a few schools and did some clinics with them, and then in the afternoon we went to a footy club and helped them out a bit.
I’ve never really done anything like that before, but it was really fun.
On the second day, we were at the Starlight Extravaganza, which was one of the things I enjoyed the most.
With the Starlight group we went bowling, and then in the afternoon we teamed up with Special Olympics Tasmania to play a bit of bocce!
It’s a bit strange - a couple of years ago I was a school kid and looking up to the players who came out to visit us, and now it’s the other way around and there’s kids kind of looking up to me.
The biggest surprise was how many questions the kids want to ask you and how much they want to know about the AFL.
One kid asked me if we were going to win the premiership again. I said 'we hope so', but it’s obviously a pretty hard question for me to answer because I’ve only been here a couple of months!
It was good a learning experience for me – seeing how the older guys go about it, how they talk to the kids and teach them things.
It was a pretty full on couple of days, and I definitely slept well when we arrived back in Melbourne on Saturday night.
We had Sunday and Monday off, then got straight back into training yesterday.
It’s back to the normal routine now – and hopefully I can keep doing all the right things and put my hand up to play against the Tigers on Saturday!
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