Start of the Season

Hello all,

It has been a little over a week since my last update and a lot has happened since then.

The most important event being the start of the Wolves 2011 campaign, and what a start it was. We beat Capalaba, who are supposed to be one of the top 5 teams in our league, 4-1. The win was significant for a couple of reasons, other than just getting off to a winning start. As a club over the past 3 years Wolves have struggled in the start of the season, usually finding themselves in the bottom 3 or 4 of the league after 5 games. However, we are determined to avoid that this year, and a 4-1 win is a very good beginning (although I am pretty upset we didn’t keep the shutout). W were able to do this while missing 3 impact starters, although Steffen Vroom did come in after 60 minutes and ended up scoring. The guys who did step in and play for our suspended players did very well so we are expecting to have strength in our depth this year, although we are pretty excited to play with our entire first choice squad. You can watch highlights of the game on Thewashingline.com.au just search for Wolves vs. Capalaba in the recent updates.

As for how I played, my distribution was garbage but my defending was pretty good. I need to play significantly better in our next game.

The other exciting thing is that I now have 2 roommates, Steffen Vroom (who played with me at DePaul for four years) and Pat McMahon, who played at UIC and trained with me for the past year and a half. It is really nice having them down here so that we can train together in our spare time, do a little exploring, and just have some guys to hang out with. In fact yesterday we did go on an adventure, traveling down the coast a little ways to Mt. Tamborine…

This trip helped me make some headway on my bucket list! We did a few things while we were up there. The first was a hike that took us through the rainforest and past a pretty cool waterfall (2/3 waterfalls complete). Hiking through the rainforest is a pretty cool experience, because of all the shade it stays cool on the forest floor and only a few shafts of light find their way through the canopy. This yielded some awesome pictures. After completing the hike we walked around a little tourist town with a bunch of gift shops and vineyards/wineries. We then drove around the mountain a little bit stopping at a few lookouts that had great views of Gold Coast and the surrounding countryside. We ended our trip with a stop at the rainforest skywalk (on my bucket list) to do some recon for our next stop on the mountain.

That’s all I have time to write about for now. We have another game this Saturday, so we are preparing to continue the good start to our season.

Hope everyone is well back home!