Wednesday, February 4, 2004

BLIZZARDS

Tomorrow is Thursday, and the plane is scheduled to leave for Tempe at 1:40 p.m. I moved the leave Fort Collins departure time to an hour earlier than planned. We are in the second day of a lengthy-but-not-heavy snowstorm. The roads are treacherous and figure to stay that way for the foreseeable future. It might be hurry up and wait once we get to the airport. Whatever. Nothing will ever be easy, and we already know this.

Hopefully, if we get out of town there will be no snow when we arrive in the Valley of the Sun. It is Arizona after all. It only snows south of Flagstaff once in a Blue Moon, right? Maybe, but I have already witnessed that particular shade of the lunar surface sometime earlier in life, on a drive from California to New Mexico with my dog Molly. Personally I am bringing fuzzy hats and rain gear, prepared for anything. You can always take it off. Janet Jackson showed me the way.

AND BUTTERFLIES

I have no idea if we are any good. It would seem that we have tremendous potential as a lacrosse team, but who knows anything when everyone is 0-0. How far along are we? We don't have a handle on that either, but we are dying to find out. It is for sure that we are not as far along as I might want. I think we are in decent running condition, but we haven’t had much practice in the last week to get as "Game ready" as I would like.

We will need to really PAY ATTENTION on defense. It’s strange, because I have stressed mostly only the bare boned basics of our team defense at practice. At the same time we are always working on some "high tech" part of it too, looking to go new places and explore new frontiers of the concept of Team Defense. Part of CSU lacrosse has a lot of college experience, and the "other half" has basically none. We are in the linking process now.

We always strive to play rough, and still not commit fouls. We are a much better team when we are penalty free. We have done well with that in practice. I hope it carries over.

I expect us to take control of the area of the field between the restraining boxes, the middle of the field. That is where we must be strong. We need to get the ball in face-off situations and control loose balls to be effective. Every team wants to win the ground ball war. We are no exception.

Offensively I will stress attacking, and using our strengths to get really good looks at the goal. I believe we have offensive talent, but that it still needs to find a little more rhythm. The way to do this is to be fundamentally sound, and to make smart choices, because we have no offensive plays, as usual. At practice, we have spent a lot of time in Fundamentalville, Lax 101. I guess we will see this weekend if we are ready to move on to Lax 102.

We are going to try and practice twice in Tempe before the game Friday night.

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