Trainingslager

The weekend was filled with a lot of football, as the Unicorns took off to a place outside of Stuttgart for their preseason training camp. We took the afternoon friday to travel to a sports school called Ruit, which was about an hour away from Schwäbisch Hall. While we were there we had several practices throughout the weekend: One Friday night, one Saturday morning and one in the afternoon, followed by a walkthrough in the evening, and finally one Sunday morning. It was a lot of practice time, but it felt good to get back to playing a lot of football and slanging the rock around!

The facilities were very nice and set up to house many athletes. We only used one turf field while there were several more grass fields, weight rooms, indoors soccer fields, pools, and more.

Of course the field was set up with soccer lines, but it is Europe!

After Our rainy first practice in The Hall, it was nice to get away and practice on a solid surface that didn't get too wet! Practices were very similar but also very different from my playing days at Linfield. We had many of the same parts of practice, for example 1 on 1s, Skelly, and Indis (individuals), however the overall demeanor was different than a Wildcat practice. Head coach Siegfried (Ziggy) Gehrke says that he gets his practice style from coaches like, legendary coach from St John's John Gagliardi, as well as PLU's great coach Frosty Westering. The focus in practice is put more on assignments and learning rather than hitting and intensity. It is different from what I am used to but for the situation that I am in being a little more laid back fits!

These were the dorm rooms that we stayed in.

 I stayed in my room in between practices and at night with Felix Brenner, receiver and fellow quarterback on the team. Felix is a very cool guy and was a good roommate to have during our stay at Ruit. He speaks very good English and we had a good time finding out more about each other's cultures and backgrounds. I was somewhat of a pest when I continued to inquire the meaning of different words in German haha.

Dining Hall

Dining Hall from other side haha

 Meal times are very interesting as at times all you will hear is German and not know what was being said for ten minutes at a time. Most of the time, however, the German teammates are very good at including us in the conversation and/or having someone translate some of it to us.

On that note, this team is very close. They are like Linfield. A family. They play together, hang out, and party together. After we got back from training camp we were invited by one of the older players to go to a sor tof water park not too far away from downtown The Hall. It was really sweet. It had several water slides, multiple pools, diving board, hot tub and some massage spots in the water! it was a lot of fun bonding with the guys and relaxing a bit after the long weekend!

This was the actual waterslide!