Junior Season Part 1

Our Junior football season wrapped up about a month ago and I thought I would give you all a broader look inside our season.  I’m not going to give you a highlight by highlight look at every game, but I will highlight key games and key moments in our season.

We started our season at our preseason camp outside of Prague.  Taking almost a full week and devoting that to football, like we would in the States, is almost unheard of here.  We can’t do it with our senior team because most of them have full time jobs.  We are able to do it with our juniors, however, because high school age students have fewer commitments outside of school.  We had a good number of guys turn out for camp.  We had the two a days that everyone in football should go through, as well as some fun team competitions.  This year at camp we were also graced by the presence of Doug Harrod, Zach’s father, and a man with an extensive history as a coach. 

Lions assistant coaches working on dinner in Berlin.

Every year we put our players through a leadership program during camp.  Many programs do this through Champions Manuals or Winners Manuals.  Ours is called Srdce Lva (Heart of the Lion).  Every year we add some things and take a few things out.  It gets slightly bigger every year.  Through it we are able to introduce concepts of leadership that the education system here lacks.  We hope to instill a sense of leadership, team, and respect in all of our players.  It is also a “happy coincidence” that all of the concepts mentioned in Srdce Lva are ideas drawn from spiritual principles. 

The first two weeks of our season saw us in different parts of Germany.  We had a controlled scrimmage in Berlin against Berlin Adler.  We had a practice the Saturday afternoon that we arrived, then a combined practice on Sunday morning then a controlled scrimmage in the afternoon.  Saturday night we were able to watch the Alder senior team play a game.  The Adler senior team is one of the top teams in Europe, so it was great to be able to learn from them.  The scrimmage itself did was a scrimmage was supposed to do:  expose weak points.  We had a few holes to work on after watching the scrimmage film.  Zach did not go on the trip because he was quite sick.

The next week we were in the town of Chemnitz. Given that this team was nearing the end of their season, and we were just starting ours, combined with the poor play of the previous week, I was a little concerned about how our team would match up.  Our guys stepped up and owned almost every facet of the game.  We won 42-9.  Everything seemed to click well for us.  It was by no means a flawless game, but it stood in stark contrast to the scrimmage. 

Our first Czech league game was against our rivals, the Prague Panthers.  Jitters naturally exist in that first game.  One of our first snaps went over the quarterback.  I think I had a small heart attack as he ran back, picked up the ball, dodged a couple defenders, and ran 60 yards for a touchdown on the broken play.  After that our guys settled down and we pounded out a 35-0 win.

 

Our next four games came against significantly weaker opponents.  We beat the Pribram Bobcats twice and shut out the Pardubice Bucks twice.  Those games are the most frustrating time of the season because guys realize that these games are against weaker competition.  Lack of focus becomes an issue, both in practices and in games.  We continued to improve, despite this.  Some of those games were closer than they needed to be, but eventually the guys realized the importance of focus and concentrating on the week's opponent.   

Tomorrow I will highlight our final game and give some of my thoughts on the season.