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!

Cruising Town And A New Team

Nish and I slept pretty well on our first night in "The Hall" (should my new name for Schwäbisch Hall catch on?) and we decided to take what was the rest of the morning and head into town. The town of Schwäbisch Hall is located somewhat smack-dab in the middle of Europe, well if you dont include Spain. And since I know you might want to go straight to google maps, just click here.

Notice: old and beautiful

We needed some breakfast for the morning so we started our little adventure, looking for a bakery. We cruised around for a bit wide eyed at the beautiful old buildings that are in the main area of the city. Most of the town was built hundreds of years ago so a lot of the builds have a classic look to them.

There was a bakery not too far from the main path we had taken so we stopped in and made our first German purchases, a pair of croissants (which were delicious). We had to pay in euros of course and use all the interesting little coins that we had.  We literally continued walking in a very large circle around the city, taking us a little over an hour at our leisurely pace. (I promise that I will be taking plenty of pictures and will post them up soon! ...Meg!)

Not long after our return our newest addition to our house came, Justice. He played at Wofford College and will play receiver for the Unicorns. He is a real nice guy and has some southern boy in him from what I can tell! Speaking of the Unicorns.....

We had our first practice last night!! Well I should say, OUR first practice WITH the team. The team has actually been practicing for a few months here and there already. All of our practices are at night because all of the German players have normal jobs and come from their work to practices. Unfortunately we seemed to have brought some Oregon weather with us and it proceeded to rain for the whole practice on us! Just our luck... It was a very good practice however, even though it was much shorter than a Linfield practice. Which... "in reality" isn't very hard to do haha. It is always fun for me to learn new offenses so I'm in heaven right now as I start to get the Unicorns system down!

Everyone one the team is very accepting of us Ami's (aka americans). They are all very nice and friendly! It will be tough to remember all the names of my teammates two fold, as there are quite a few to remember and there are some names I've never heard before! We begin our training camp tomorrow and will have two practices a day for the weekend, so it should be very fun, but time consuming! Wish me luck!