Chisipite Senior Girls School proved their mettle, outclassing a field of 24 teams to be crowned champions of the Golden and Silver Girls Hockey tournament at Arundel.

It was sweet revenge for the Trish Davies-coached school in beating Hellenic Academy 2-1 as they had lost to the same opponents in the Milne Shield Indoor Hockey tournament in March.

Chisipite, rated the titans of Zimbabwe schoolgirl hockey, had also finished the Jan Robertson league season in third position behind surprise winners Mabelreign Girls High and runners-up Dominican Convent.

Thus they arrived at Arundel with their confidence shaken, but their mood menacing as they were out to reclaim the biggest knockout competition for girls hockey that they had last won in 2013.

Marondera's Watershed College overcame Goldridge College of Kwekwe 1-0 in the final of the Silver Girls category. The Golden and Silver Girls divisions each comprised 12 teams, divided into two groups apiece.

With captain Cheryl Dzapasi and the Terblanche sisters Alexei, Danielle and Natalie in imperious form, Chisipite early on showed the gulf of difference between them and all their adversaries.

Their opening encounter in Pool B produced a 3-0 whitewashing of Petra and the green and white-clad girls had fired their first warning shots. Paired against Mutare side Hillcrest in the second group game, Chisipite made it two out of two with a 3-1 victory.

Their crowd-pulling group game against long-standing rivals and hosts Arundel ended 2-1 in Chisipite's favour before recording a similar scoreline against indoor hockey champions Hellenic and a 1-0 defeat of Dominican Convent that parachuted them to the tournament's last four.

Awaiting them in the semis were defending champions Peterhouse, winners in 2014 and 2015, but the Marondera school never knew what hit them this time as they fell heavily to the super-charged Chisipite 0-3.

Hellenic Academy, called the Knights, were runners-up to Chisipite in Pool B but secured their own passage to the final from a hard-fought semi-final clash against Gateway who finished first in Pool A after edging Peterhouse into second place.

Coached by Chris Fourie, the Knights gave as good as they got in the final staged on the country's only artificial hockey turf to be found at a school. Inner left and captain Amy Brooke stole them the lead in the first-half after Taya Trivella's short-angled pass from the right spotted her unattended and she obliged by beating Megan Wheeler, Chisipite's goalie, all systems out.

It appeared then that Hellenic were on their way to adding the field hockey crown to their indoor title as they hung on their lead at half time and kept their opponents at bay in the early minutes of the second period.

However, coach Davies, one of the famous Golden Girls of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, had changed strategies at the break and Chisipite had returned a different side.

Simone Herbst and Mutsa Bera took charge of the midfield and wowed the crowd with their close ball control and some fancy stickwork that piled the pressure on Hellenic forcing the Borrowdale Road school to concede successive short corners that in the end proved their undoing.

From two consecutive short corners in a space of four minutes, Chisipite turned the game around with Courtney Lowe and team captain Cheryl Dzapasi finding the target past Hellenic goalie Samantha Mare and the game was as good as over.