Sunday, February 4, 2007

SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY!

Boy, it seems far back to the days of yore, when drag racing with Big Daddy Don Garlitz and Shirley Muldowny was the biggest event in the tri-state area on a Sunday afternoon once football season was mostly over.  Now, ESPN is the mantra for sports worshippers and addicts alike, and there could never be a time anymore when some kind of game competition is not on, live or a classic one, take your choice.

Do people still actually go to drag races?  I'll bet there is still a large element in our population that does. 

I was amazed, and I know that ticket prices are different and all, but I went to the Denver Nuggets' game the other night against, granted, the Charlotte Bobcats.  There were like 15,000 there, and much of the top deck was sparsely filled.  One week earlier I had attended a Colorado Mammoth lacrosse game at that same Pepsi Center and the place was packed with over 18,000 people.  I know Gavin Prout and Gary Gait are big and all, but they are hardly Melo and Allen Iverson.  All I have to say is, "Wow!"  Who would have thunk it?

It is Super Bowl Sunday.  For the record I have chosen the Colts to easily defeat Duh' Bears in XLI(?).  Some think that my pick alone would be good reason to bet heavily on the Bears.

COLD IS NOT JUST A STATE OF MIND

It is still frigid, bad to the bone cold here in our part of the Arctic Circle.  We will hopefully have a football sized turf field to practice lacrosse on twice a week beginning Monday night.  Remember that we still have not had an outdoor practice of any kind.  It is my supreme hope that we can practice for those two hours Monday in temperatures of at least, c'mon, let's say, well, I will gladly take above the teens.  The field of which I speak is currently completely surrounded by snow in the form of a piled up snow bank, right up to the field lines.  It will be like playing with hockey boards.  Plus, I am going to be in trouble with my white lacrosse balls.  I best invest locally in some orange ones or I could be balless by Tuesday morning.  The white ones blend right into snow, been there, done, that.  Of course then the dirty snow will melt someday, relinquishing a river of white balls sometime next month when we aren't using that facility anymore.

THE FICKLED FINGER OF THE COACH'S BRAIN

I feel like I have been a little brain dead lately.   Last week the messages were not flowing freely from my mouth to their little ears. Maybe they aren't really 'little' ears, but rather bat ears, and they really can hear more that one might think.  God only knows what they are thinking, staring out at me from their beady little team eyes.

I'm not sure I knew what I was talking about or trying to say half the time for a few days there.  I wasn't having 'good' days in general, and I was having domestic 'issues', so I wasn't sure where one thing started or the other thing left off. 

What last week says to me now lacrosse-wise is that I was beginning to over think and over analyze, and therefore over coach.  I'm not going to go there, so the next few days will have to be, in my mind, very different from the last ones.  In the player's eyes hopefully this week won't look too different from the one before, just better.

TIME, TIME, TIME, SEE WHAT'S BECOME OF ME

We are all dying to play a game, yet we still have three weeks until we play one.

My focus is to straighten out my coaching head and then to make some 'hay' with these next 4 consecutive usable field practices, albeit they be at three different times and at least two different locations.  The way I plan on doing this 'harvesting' of the team is two-fold.  First I want to put together a lot of simple skeleton drills that involve intense repetition. The idea is to smoothly CRAM certain things into the old muscle memory bank for safe keeping and future 'market' growth.  Second I want to play full field lacrosse as much as I think is good for us, and I want it to seem as much like a game for parts of that time as is humanly possible. 

We indeed aren't ready for a game, so it is just as well that we don't actually have one yet, but we desperately need some 'intensity reps' that you just can't get anywhere this side of a real game.   You can get a little bit close with a full-field scrimmage now and then.

ISN'T IT IRONIC

They are playing for real in Texas and California already.  I'm thinking about where to play our first home game, which is just over a month away, because playing it on campus is already becoming a dubious proposition at best.

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