Lacrosse World Championships - Day Three

GAME ON

Running laps at 6.30 in the morning is not my favorite pastime. No sir. Nevertheless, life of the pro-athlete demands it and so i must abide. I will not desend to complaining. No. Not even when I repeatedly trip in my laces or balls bounce of my helmet because my vision is blured with sleep.

well, you wake up eventually. When driving back to the motel everybody normal in traffic is on their way to work, just starting their day. In fact other guests at the Super 8 were still making an effort to enjoy the complimentary breakfast when we returned sweaty and wide awake.

Being up that early made me feel like I had this huge advantage on everybody else in the world who had just gotten out of bed. A huge advantage that lasted all the way to the room, all the time until I desided to fall a sleep and not wake up before early afternoon. Most of the team made a similar desision.

Thus rested the four van convoy, in which we move around, set course for the Tigers stadium in downtown Detroit. Our well conected coach knows the COO of the Detroit Tigers (he coached his son), so we had a nice tour of the stadium.
 
It was a wonderful opportunity for the team to fuck around and crack bad jokes at the tour guide. For those who don't know it: some of the tigers shoot lasers out their eyes and the pressbox menu is usually hot dogs, chicken strips or lasagna. The lasers aren't dangerous, but the food might be. Our tourguide, Jill, wasn't sure. She was sure, though, that we could all fit in the stadium elevators, and she knew this because; as she said: she did it with a hockey team last week.
"You did it with a hockey team?"

The rest of the day ment more relaxing. Some of the guys went to a lacrosse equipment store (we don't have those in Denmark. In fact we can't even buy lacrosse equipment anywhere but on-line). They returned happy and exilharated, like Iowa housewives from a shopping spree on New York's 5th avenue.

Another big deal is that the official national team uniforms arrived. They are sweet. The numbers aren't regulation size though. Danes are very fashion oriented people and the regulatory size of the numbers just wouldn't have looked as good. We are not going to use them until the tournament though.

Of course the biggest event of the day was the scrimmage against the local all-star team called "Serpents" as it turned out. We had been told that it was a high school team with some college players on it. Well, it also turned out that even though I am sure they have all gone to high school, it is quite a lot of years ago. In fact several of them had graduated such colleges as Princeton, Maryland and Harvard.

Before the game coach Cone told his squad that "today we are not even going to count the score! It is a practice match. We are here to learn."

The match was a bit unusual in the way that our coach would ask the Serpents to take a guy off the field, because we would like to play man up for a while. "Ok," they would say and send a guy off. It was like a Jedi mind trick or something!!! I hope it works in London.

Regardless of whether it was actually telekinese or just friendly opponents, they still managed to beat us 16-4 (sorry coach, I counted!). A result which we are not too concerned with, however. It was our first match as a team in over a year and at no point in the match did we roll over and give up. It was bone-crunching (our bones mostly).

We found out a great deal about the team. A lot of players got time on the field to figure out their form and just getting a feel for being out there against an adversary that moves (a lot!) faster than what we are used to in the Danish league (two teams, as you might remember). Also we have found our face-off guy. Martin Baadsgaard, thirtysomething, takes face-offs for Ballerup Bandits back home and stepped up to the dot about ten times. He won more than half of them, thus helping out the offense a lot.

"The offense is the most consistent we've ever had. Our goalie is outstanding. The team in general is up to speed with where we were last summer," Coach Cone said, but also had a bit of critisism,
"We are sloppy in transition. We need to be tighter, smarter and communicate more."

A point defensive coach Dave Piechowski agreed with:
"The transition D is... spotty," he said and laughed. "It's less than expected. The settle D is all right. We will make some significant adjustments in training tomorrow so we should do better in the next game."

That concluded Tuesday, for the majority of us. Some of our younger players went to a nearby bowling alley. They originally had dates with a couple of young waitresses from the bar next to the motel, but for some reason they didn't manage to hook up. Instead they got piss drunk from rum and coke, hit on other guy's girls and returned to Super 8 with the desire to puke. And so they did.

Morning practice tomorrow is at nine so that's nice. We will be warming up for our second match against the Serpents tomorrow night.