Soccer Preseason Diary: Day 5
8/18/2006 12:00:00 AM | Soccer
The University of Alabama soccer team is gearing up for the 2006 season with preseason training camp this week in Orange Beach, Alabama. Throughout the week, www.rolltide.com will chronicle Alabama's preseason workouts through a series of diary entries from the Alabama players leading right up to the Tide's season-opening scrimmage at the UA Soccer Stadium on Saturday, August 19 against Samford at 7 p.m.
Day 5
The mornings come pretty early around here. If you need treatment, you have to be up and at the training condo by 7:30 a.m. If you are lucky enough to not need treatment, then you get to enjoy those additional minutes of precious sleep.
We loaded up our vans and headed out to the Sportsplex, laced up our boots and were ready to work by 9 a.m. After yesterday's beach workout it was good to be back on grass with a ball at our feet. Having gotten our initial fitness training out of the way, we are now focusing on refining our skills even though there is no doubt that assistant coach Katie Barnes will include her ever-present "hidden fitness". We did the usual: passing, defending, and Jeremy looking more like a field goal kicker than a soccer player while training the keepers. We had a good morning session and ended it as we usually do, spending time in our freezing ice baths followed by the even more enjoyable presentation of ice bags from our training staff.
Coach Staley rewarded our hard work with the afternoon session off, much to our appreciation. Before we loaded up, we gave Mitchell Nelson, our PA announcer, our list of grocery items that we had run out of and he and Coach Staley set a new speed record while shopping at the grocery store. If we have accomplished anything this week, you can say that eating well was one of those things.
After receiving our much needed groceries, it was lunch time and nap time to reenergize for our evening session.
We scrimmaged hard and implemented our newly incorporated restarts and set pieces. The team is really coming together and at this point we feel that we are developing an identity as a cohesive unit, not just a collection of individual players and personalities. To close practice, we played a game of soccer-volleyball. The coaches, managers, trainers and all of us players went head-to-head using our hands, feet, heads and anything else we could use to attain victory. In a battle that featured numerous game points for both teams, the highlight was our manager Brody's point-scoring flying bicycle kick. The game ended on a controversial call by Coach Staley, but the end also signaled that it was time for dinner, so none of us really complained.
The Orange Beach Parks and Recreation guys came through once again, providing us another delicious meal. For the third night in a row, we watched the '92 National Championship game. How can we not be inspired? That magical season is what dreams are made of. After dinner, it was back to the condos to do just that, dream a little dream.
Until tomorrow,
The Alabama Soccer Team
