Yesterday's Practice Was Pretty Good.

We had a pretty great turnout from the A team guys, and a few B team guys were there as well. Overall, I would say that I was pleasantly surprised at the conditioning of most of the people on the team. Clearly, people have been working hard this break. I think I was most impressed with Allan. He isn't the fastest runner on the team (by any stretch) but he was always one of the top few to finish the sprints, especially as the practice progressed.

I was a little dissappointed, however, that the practice wasn't more difficult. When I planned the workout, I had believed that it would be practically insumountable for most of the players on our team. I really intended to use this practice as a wake up call, to shock my team into being prepared to work exceptionally hard. And that isn't to say that people Didn't work hard yesterday - people really struggled and then pushed through their fatigue to finish the workout. But that's the thing: people finished the workout and didn't look terribly sick at the end. Our next sprint workout is going to have to be considerably harder. I think that I'm going to do this by lightening the number of sprints per set (to help people to push their hardest through every single sprint rather than slowing down on the last couple due to exhaustion) and decrease the amount of rest time between sets. I was giving two minutes for water between each set of sprints. Next time, I'll toy with the idea of only giving one and of having more shuttle runs, suicides, and foot fires.

After practice, I ate dinner with the team and then went to the gym. There were some other people there, but I mostly worked with Patuluk and Keenen. Both of them worked pretty hard, but I was surprised at how little weight they were able to lift. Or how much weight they believe they can lift. I really think that a lot of it is in their heads; they think that they can only military press 20 pounds, which intimidates them from trying to lift more. I'm going to have to break them of this in the next couple of weeks to get them up to some respectable weights and build more explosive muscle. All in all, however, I am proud of the amount of work that they did for this first day. I hope that we can all keep it up.

Today is a snow day, which means no classes and the gym is closed (no lifting, bah). Since we clearly can't do the plyo workout and the agilities that we were planning on doing today, we are heading onto the field to play snow football. That should be a good, fun way for the team to get together and bond rather than just working out. Sprints can be tiring and demoralizing. It's definitely good to mix up the workouts to keep everybody fresh and into the program. I'm excited to go play football and hang out with the team.

This year is off to a great start.