Athletes Journal: Life of a college athlete during preseason

Athlete Journal Entry #8: Thursday, August 29, 2002

As we set ourselves up for our first game of the year against Eastern, the week as a whole was a little bit more relaxed in one sense and a little bit more intense in another. While we had much more time to sleep and relax, especially with Monday off, each practice was much more important and much more intense than it had been the previous week.

Tuesday began at 3:30 p.m. with a very tough fitness session in the pool.

We did relays, we pulled ourselves up out of the pool using only the muscles in our arms in repetitions of 15. The hardest part was when we had to jog and sprint in the water. We were not allowed to hold on to anything at all, but we had to move our legs as fast as we could.

When we were "jogging," it meant that we were also moving our arms at a rapid speed under the water as well, but "sprinting" meant that we had our arms out of the water and our legs were the only thing allowed to keep us afloat.

While this session only lasted an hour, it was probably one of the hardest things that many of the guys admitted to doing. For those people who were pretty good swimmers, it really was not that hard at all.

After dinner on Tuesday, we went out to the fields and after having been away from a soccer ball for more than 48 hours, it was interesting to see how people came back into it.

The practice was set for making sure everybody worked hard, and this was the first time that we actually stepped onto our game field. We worked on positioning because our field is a little bit wider than the one we practice on.

The evening ended with a sprinting drill around the outside of the field.

On Wednesday we were supposed to have two practices, however, head coach Dan Wagner decided to change that and it was excellent.

We had only one practice, but it was quite a bit longer than we had gone for one session. We did a lot of battling with a partner who played the same position. Some of them were entirely dealing with soccer, whereas there were a couple of battles that were more for the mental aspect of the drill. This was a fun and intense session.

Thursday was a day for rest more than anything else. Our opener would be the following day, so it was important that everybody was healthy and set to play.

We spent an hour-and-a-half working on what would be our warm-up before every game, and then practice was over.

With a lot of time to yourself to warm-up followed by some of the passing drills we have been working on, followed once again by a positional drill and then a good possession game. As we learned the timing of how things would work the hours before a game it was good to see who could get themselves mentally prepared and who could not.

Eastern University awaits tomorrow and it will be great to see how our team matches up against good competition.