Pre-season 2012!!

I'm a little late in updating this, but preseason has gone, and is going well!  We started our year with a BBQ at my house on the 29th of August, and tomorrow (Sept. 6th) is the last day of official preseason practice.   Many parents were able to join us for our BBQ, which was fun, and it's always a fun night having all the players meet, or re-meet since the only time they would have met would have been on a recruiting visit.  We had a lot of food with chicken and pork on the grill, pasta salad, fruit salad, and grilled veggies from Greg's Meat Market, and a wonderful farmer's market salad from the Andersons.  The team did a short interview process with each other as a means of getting to know one another better.  Brian and Sylvie brought their girls, who get along very well with my kids, but don't get to spend much time together because of living in different school districts, and Rob was a very willing grill master, which was great.  Only Max was left out, and with so many "girls" around, he was hiding out on the computer, or in the playroom with Brian's wife Sylvie showing her all of his LEGOs.

With days of double practices looming ahead of us, after we ate, we separated so the players could continue moving into their rooms, and get a good night's sleep before our Fitness Test.  All went well the next day, and I was impressed with our overall Testing results, which was great.

In the middle of our double session days that weekend, I gave them an afternoon off and the Captains took the team on a gorgeous local hike!  We may have led all the underclassmen to believe that we were doing an outdoor fitness run....but it was a great day to take advantage of the late summer weather, and everyone was thrilled to find out it was really just for FUN!  Two days later, we'd picked the final roster, and had a scrimmage with St. Mikes, right here in Pepin Gym!  It was a very relaxed feel with the bleachers still shoved in, and virtually no one on campus (although the Freshmen were all arriving that day!).  We did have on uniforms, and had officials, and warm-up music, so it was official enough to give us the feel we were looking for, but scrimmages are great to try out all kinds of combinations, and make changes (and mistakes, like putting the wrong person on the lineup sheet, and not having to waste a sub to change it!) and just roll with it.

It was a successful night on all accounts, I think.  We were a bit unorganized with our warm-up, since we'd only practiced it once earlier that day, but that's part of the reason you have preseason scrimmages.  The freshmen arrived a tad late due to Orientation responsibilities, and they had to leave early, but we played them all for the 2nd game, and they did a great job, winning against St. Mikes younger players, so that was a good start for them, I'd say!  They all ran off right after that set to get to their respective Hall Meetings on time.

We played 4 games, and did not count it as a match, but we won all four individual games, which was good to see.  They were all relatively close, and we showed some good early-season grit by not dropping any of those sets.  Now, we're preparing to play our first tournament down at Endicott this weekend, and none of our freshmen are allowed to come with us.  They'll be knee deep in Orientation Activities, and actually will be registering for classes on Saturday while we're playing Susquehanna.  We'll miss them terribly, but after all, an education IS why they came to MIDD!  :)

Tonight the team cooked their own dinner after going to the local farmer's market before practice today.  I've not yet heard how it all came out, but they looked pretty happy about it!  A good, local feast of fresh farmer's market goods is hard to beat, especially when you've prepared it all yourselves.  Plus, the house still looks very clean!

Keep checking in as the game write-ups will start very soon...