Scotland Under 16 Women had a tough weekend in Denmark as they attended the Copenhagen Invitational tournament.

Used as a warmup for the FIBA European Championships which take place later this Summer, teams from across Europe gather in Copenhagen each year.

First up on the Friday for Scotland was Iceland, with the game ending in a narrow 50-59 defeat. Friday’s afternoon game was even tighter, with Scotland the victors on this occasion as they picked up the win v the hosts, Denmark.

On Saturday morning Scotland faced the group leaders, Csata DSE, and were defeated by 75-30. Following the group stages, Scotland were placed into the 9-12 placing group, where England 2 awaited on Saturday night.

The Women recovered well from the morning’s defeat to record a 56-25 win over the other home nations side. This meant the hosts Denmark awaited on the Sunday morning, with a 65-45 victory for the home side concluding Scotland’s tournament.

Head Coach Donnie McDonald was very complimentary of the teams in Copenhagen, but insisted his focus was using the event as a learning curve for the Championships:

“The Copenhagen Invitational is always a fantastic event and once again it was very well organised and competitive. We were drawn in a very tough group with the teams that finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd at last year’s tournament, so it was always going to be a tough, but valuable experience.”

Despite the tough games, Donnie is happy that they have identified strengths and weaknesses to work on in the coming weeks:

“The key things that we took from the tournament were that we were much more able to cope with pressure defence than at last year’s event, when a number of the squad had also played. We showed great composure and character to come back and win against Denmark in our second game, however our execution was not as good in our first and final games, which has highlighted some areas that we need to work on.”

“This tournament was always about preparation and we were able to experiment with lineups. It has shown us where we are now and where we can improve, but with over 20% of our programme’s practice time still to come, there is time for us to improve a lot in some key areas before going to Moldova in July.”