Ok, after 10 months of hard work, we finally met all the players today as they reported to the first day of pre season training.

It was great to see all the players, to say hello to the returners and to meet the new recruits. We took care of all the NCAA requirements, then brought them all in for our first team meeting.

Here was the agenda:

1. Welcome and Introductions

2. Housekeeping

3. Practice Format

4. Team Rules

5. Team Goals

6. Style of Play.

At the end of the meeting, the players now know what is expected of them, how things will run, what our goals are and how we are going to achieve them.

We set a disciplinary standard tonight, one player showed up 2 minutes late, so all of the team will be on the track at 6.30am tomorrow morning. This disciplinary measure is there to help us set the standards and to illustrate that if one player does not maintain our standards, the whole team will lose. Just like the game really!!!

Tomorrow the schedule is as follows:

8.45am-10.00am YOGA
10.30am-11.30am Team Meeting
1.00pm-3.00pm Practice 1
6.00pm-8.00pm Practice 2

Tomorrow’s first practice will be as follows:

12.45pm-1.00pm Arrrive for practice and get ready, juggle a ball while waiting

1.00pm-1.15pm Warm Up and Stretch

1.15pm – 1.45pm Conditioning

1.45pm-2.00pm Ball Work

2.00pm-2.20pm 4on4 scrimmages

2.20pm-2.40pm 8on8 scrimmages

2.40pm-3.00pm 11on11 scrimmage

The ideas behind this format is to get the players out there with a moderate conditioning session and as much scrimmaging as possible. This is because we want to take a look at what we have as soon as possible. We will then be able to put together our next few practices knowing what we are working with.

I’ll let you know how it goes!