posted May 11th, 2007 - The next international NSL News update comes from the Netherlands. The first meet of the new season is the Tomscat Trophy 2007, which is scheduled for June 23. Several teams currently prepare for this year's event, and the situation in the Netherlands has changed.

Punky Fish has dominated the 4-way competition in the European country for years. However, the line-up that competed at the World Meet 2006 in Germany (Alexander Egberink, Bert Hajee, Paul Hofstee, Donald Verveld, Johan Wieken) did not continue at the end of the 2006 season, and three Punky Fish members formed new teams.

One of the two Punky Fish founders, Paul Hofstee, is now training and competing with "Dynamic Fource". The other original Punky Fish member, Bert Hajee, continues with Alexander Egberink and has formed team "50/50".

Paul Hofstee's new team members with Dynamic Force are Meus van der Poel, Erwin van den Braak and Koen van der Venne. They trained and competed with team R-Fource in 2003 and 2004. Mike Pennock was filming the team, and Pim Pennock was the alternate.

R-Fource was the national 4-way team for the Netherlands at the World Meet 2004 in Croatia and made approx. 200 team jumps per year. The highest score for R-Fource was a 15.6 average, and the team finished with a 13.4 average in 15th position at the World Meet 2004. R-Fource attended one more competition in 2005 before the team members took a break from 4-way competition, became busy as Tandem and AFF instructors and joined the swooping community.

Meus van der Poel, Erwin van den Braak and Koen van der Venne now launched their comeback with former Punky Fish member Paul Hofstee. Hans van Marrewijk is filming the new team, Dynamic Fource.

Dynamic Fource began with the team training in January 2007 and completed 15 hours of wind tunnel training in the Netherlands before traveling to Florida for the first training camp in DeLand with coach Gary Smith. The training will continue on the island of Texel during the summer season, where coach Gary Smith has his European headquarters.

Paul Hofstee said that his new team has the World Meet 2008 in France as the final goal: "We plan to make about 200 team jumps per year, train in the wind tunnel and score as high as possible." Dynamic Fource had already completed 77 training jumps at the current spring camp in DeLand and had five more training days to come.

The training went well. Coach Gary Smith sent the team into a training competition with Norway's team Arcteryx and Danish Blaze after two days to see where the new line-up was positioned. Dynamic Fource scored a 15.7 average after 11 training rounds, which was improved to 16.3 a few days later.

The NSL News will follow up soon with an update introducing the other Dutch teams that will give Dynamic Force a competition in the Netherlands this year.