American arrival

We finally have our whole team here. Well at least for the most part. Our 3 American import players arrived last Monday. They have been spending a lot of time getting adjusted to things here as well as us coaches trying to give them a crash course in our schemes. It is less than 2 weeks until our first game and suffice it to say that there is a lot of work to be done.

We are going to kind of mesh what our American players are familiar with and run it along with what Jim and I are familiar with at St Johns. It didn't make a lot of sense to not mesh the two. No use forcing something on the Americans that doesn't fit their skill set. Long story short, we brought over some thoroughbreds and we plan on riding them as far as they will take us.

Now that we have our American players here we have finally gotten a chance to really put in both our offensive and defensive schemes. Prior to them getting here, we kind of had to keep things real generic and just work on skill development. That is all well and good, but at the end of the day you have to be able to run some offensive plays as well.

Our training camp starts this Wednesday and we will have 2 a days until Saturday commencing with a scrimmage against the Zurich Renegades. It will be nice to see some different schemes and personnel to work against. I am sure that there will still be a lot of work to do even after camp, but we should have a much better feel for where we are at and what needs to be done before the first game.

I have said it before, but I will say it again, things are just different here. Our squad is quite small so practice can be quite a challenge at times. Just running a full 7 on 7 or 11 on 11 period doesn't work at times because we just don't have the bodies. Guys will drive a distance of up to 2 hours just to make it to practice. The European players here love the game and want to work, there just isn't enough of them. Again, it makes me appreciate having 160 guys at practice like we do at St Johns.

Hope all is well back home. Take care

--Josh