In their third attempt at the competition, the school’s year seven girls team finished as the best in the state after a 17-6 win over Sylvania High School at Maroubra Beach.

Previously they have made the semi-finals before, but had never won it until last week.

They bounced back from an opening-round loss to Sylvania to take out the title, winning four matches from five.

The first-up 8-2 defeat provided the opportunity for the girls to improve over the remainder of the tournament that included wins over St Leo’s Catholic College and Maitland Grossman High School.

Coach Brent Wilkinson said beach touch football is a significantly different sport to the more traditional touch football – attackers always outnumber defenders.

“It’s pretty heavily modified to normal touch football because you have four attackers and three defenders all the time,” he said.

It means defensive structures are important and an ability to slide without the ball to cover space is arguably more important than what a team does with the ball.

“When possession changes you replace some of your team,” he said.

“Your defensive structures are the main difference between beach touch and normal touch.”

Wilkinson said the girls’ hard work had been rewarded after they had trained for several months leading up to the event.

“We’ve got a really strong group of girls who have been training for more than two terms for this specific event,” he said.

“They trained two times a week for about the last 15 weeks.

“It’s our most successful result for sure.”

Maddy Drewitt and Mia Bales led the way for the Camden Haven girls with impressive tournaments.

Bales was the leading tryscorer and Drewitt provided the direction.

“Mia scored over 10 tries for the competition because there were some pretty high scores from the girls in some of the games,” Wilkinson said.

Unfortunately the school’s year 8/9 boys team bowed out in the quarter-final stage, but Wilkinson was impressed with their result.

“There were three different divisions for the boys, so for them to make the quarter-finals was a great effort,” he said.

“The team that beat them would have gone close to winning the overall tournament.”

In total there were more than 50 teams which contested the 15-minute matches across the five different divisions.

“We were pretty confident the boys would have gone pretty well, but you never know what’s going to happen,” Wilkinson said.

“The boys team was pretty strong.”