Week 1 of the 2010 season is in the books! This is the longest off-season I’ve had in years and I couldn’t be more excited to get back on the field. There is so much work to be done, but we already look better than we were at the end of last season so there is a lot to look forward to.

Changing to the new format of having Varsity & JV together at practice was an interesting transition for me this week… still have a few names to learn on JV, but I thought it was productive to have both groups there. Wednesday’s main message came at the end of practice, with conditioning, but no one quit after day 1! Also, in case any of the players are wondering, we will have practices with more running in the future… the near future…

Thursday we started to get the guys pumped up for the Black/White Scrimmage. We split them into their teams and had a spirited game of “Basketball” to kick things off. After that we split into our Varsity & JV teams and worked through some half field sets.

Saturday was a perfect day for the scrimmage… always love when the Missoula weather decides to do good things for us! I thought our first line of middies (who were on the Black team) played really solid in the first half and I was encouraged to see that the Black team assisted 3 of their 4 goals in the half. Our (White) offense started to get in gear in the 3rd quarter when Hunter Brandt figured out that he actually knows how to beat his guy and get a shot off on goal… he had 2 nice dodges & finishes in the 3rd and our defense clamped down to make it a 1 goal game heading to the 4th. What more could you ask for? Since we were in the scrimmage format I was more focused on working in all our players during the final quarter than the score, but I thought the guys did a solid job finishing the game.

Today for practice we hiked to the top of Mount Jumbo and the guys got to try some pinole. At the top we talked a bit about our Circle. The Circle first came to be in 2005 when a young Grizzly squad found themselves somehow in their conference championship team against a much more prepared opponent, and found themselves down by 6 goals at the half. The concept of the Circle is pretty simple – you control what you can and you don’t worry about what you can’t. This means you do everything you can as an individual to contribute to the team, but you don’t stress about the refs, your opponent, the weather, or anything else that you really can’t control. It’s just a helpful reminder in the heat of battle to stay focused on the simple things you can do, the things that make a difference.

So now the Circle is back another year, for another team, another time. That group of Grizzly’s worked hard to build their Circle. They didn’t just focus on that second half, which they dominated to win the game, but they kept building for 3 more years… eventually winning the National Championship. They made their mark, but now is the time for Missoula Elite to make theirs.

Players – keep your sights on our center and work hard to contribute to make our team better… let’s come out popping Wednesday and get ready to take it to Sandpoint this weekend!

Also some of the guys wanted me to post the pinole recipe here, which is very simple. Just brown some corn meal (get the good grainy stuff) in a pan, then toss it in a mixing bowl with some brown sugar and cinnamon (and chia seeds if you can find them), then mix in a little water. You can make it to whatever consistency you want with really whatever portions of the ingredients you see fit… I like a 2/3 corn meal to the rest, with not too much water. Takes about 20 minutes and is very tasty! Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Varsity Letters, zFeatured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.