HEAD Coach of the Women’s National Hockey team Phillip Fernandes says preparation is well underway for the country’s squad set to participate in the upcoming Pan Am Challenge series in Bermuda in September.
The competition is anticipated to take place from September 20th – 28th, 2024 at the National Sports Centre in Pembroke, Bermuda.
The ladies’ team has been training four days a week at the GCC.

The Women’s Pan American Challenge is a quadrennial international women’s field hockey competition in the Americas, organised by the Pan American Hockey Federation.
The tournament serves as the qualification tournament for the next Women’s Pan American Cup.

Coach Fernandes said, “We expect that the team will be ready in time for then; so far training has encountered a lot of challenges, main challenge being that, we don’t have an artificial surface on which to train, which all the other competitive nations will be training on, even though we train on grass fields, out grass fields have in fact been out because of the rainy weather.”

Fernandes told Chronicle Sport that it’s been challenging getting a suitable venue have proved difficult in light of the continuous rainy weather, but they are making the most of the all-weather mat housed at the GCC ground.
“We have had to work in small spaces for most of our practice session, nevertheless, we are making do with what we have; we have don’t his in the past and have achieved some degree of success and we think we will be as ready as can be by the time the Pan Am challenge comes around.”

The hockey administrator says that they will break down the current 24 players down to 16 as they start to fine tune the players in the squad, with a more focused eye on strategies and roles.
Guyana’s best finish in the tournament was second place in 2011 in the inaugural edition in Brazil, where they lost to Uruguay in the final.