Aug. 12, 2008

August 9, 2008
By the time day 3 comes around, everyone has fallen into the daily routine. The day started with an early breakfast at KU followed by our morning practice. Today, at practice we focused more on our shape on the field. After a nice long dynamic warm-up and stretch we worked on some technical things then headed straight into playing 11 v 11. With so many new players getting on the field and just playing is sometimes the best way for them to learn our style of play.

We had about an hour break before lunch which usually consists of unpacking more things or relaxing for a while. At lunch time everyone in my house piled into my car and we headed on up to VWK. We had about two hours to let our food settle before we start our afternoon practice.

This afternoon's practice was pretty light. It started with some intense games of hand ball in which my team made it to the championship, but we couldn't pull it through and we lost to Deana's team. Despite the loss we had a lot of fun and were extremely competitive.

Throughout the rest of the practice we focused on corner kicks and free kicks in preparation for our intra squad scrimmage tomorrow afternoon. We were sure to cool down extremely well after practice, get a good stretch and hop into an ice bath if needed.

As we walked to dinner we all talked about how the first 3 days of camp flew by so fast! We all ate some more VWK food and headed back to our dorms or houses looking forward to our long break ahead. Tomorrow's schedule is a little different with no morning practice (we get to sleep in!) and an intra squad scrimmage scheduled for 3 pm.

August 10, 2008
Today we had the chance to sleep in! We had the morning off and around 10:30 we headed to a team brunch at O'Charleys. We piled into the big 12 passenger vans and headed off to eat. It is always nice to get off campus and do something different during preseason, the days start to feel very redundant after a while.

When we returned from lunch we had some time to relax before our 3:00pm practice. Instead of practicing we had an intra squad scrimmage. It is so important to play full field games during preseason. It is the best way to learn and practice our formations and offensive and defensive shapes.

After a good warm up and a strategy chat from our respective coaches Tania or Sergio, we started. Everyone played great and it seems as if the team is starting to mesh together really well! After the game we all headed to dinner and then back home to relax and prepare ourselves for the long week ahead!