St Joseph’s Regional College under-16 girls team finished the national touch football championships in Caloundra with a well-earned top-four finish.

The Port Macquarie girls finished third in Australia after Gold Coast’s Helensvale High School proved too good with a 7-5 semi-final win on September 15.

Coach Cath Eichmann was proud her girls had competed at such a high level where they were only beaten by two talented Queensland schools.

“The only other two schools that beat them were from Queensland and they ran their own touch football academies at school and have national coaches,” Eichmann said.

“For a school from Port Macquarie to compete with them is an outstanding effort.”

St Joey’s completed the first day of competition undefeated after registering 6-5, 11-1 and 6-4 victories.

Eichmann said a strong performance in the competition was dependent on a good start, which they achieved.

“The 6-5 win over Narrabeen Sports High on day one was probably one of their best performances because it was such a tight game,” she said.

Despite being placed in the “pool of death”, the local girls were up to the challenge and Eichmann believed the difficult pool spurred them on.

“In hindsight the group that the girls ended up in probably set them up for such a strong performance throughout the competition,” she said.

“They knew that they had the difficult teams so they had to be at their best for most of their games.”

Many of the side had represented Port Macquarie at Junior State Cup level over the last couple of years.

That served the school side well when the pressure was on.

“The whole team all understand each other’s games and that probably helped them,” Eichmann said.

The coach didn’t want to single any player out, but said Allie Wood was one of their main attacking threats.

“She finished the tournament with 15 tries and was the competition’s third-highest leading tryscorer,” Eichmann said.

“That was an outstanding performance because the top two girls were in teams that were winning games 15-0.”

The top-four finish was one step further than the under-16 boys who finished fifth in the country at the same tournament last year.

“We set ourselves the goal 18 months ago of going to the nationals together and performing well,” she said.

“We did that.”