APRIL 15, 2012
I cannot believe that we are almost 100 days away from the Opening Ceremonies for the 2012 London Summer Olympics. I am actually going to be in New York next Wednesday April 18th for the 100 Days Out Celebration in Time Square. I encourage anyone who is a fan of the Summer Olympics and is in New York at the time, to come out and meet all the athletes. It will be a spectacular event.
Our training schedule has been extremely busy and I have lots to tell you. During the end of March we hosted a Four Nation’s Tournament held in Thousand Oaks California. The teams that were involved in the tournament were the United States, Italy, Montenegro and Germany. This was a great tournament to test what level our team is playing at against some serious opponents. Italy is ranked number 1 in the World, Montenegro is ranked 7th and Germany is ranked 8th. We are currently ranked 6th in the World. We started off the tournament with a great win over Italy 9 to 8. Then we ended up winning 12 to 10 against Germany. We closed out the tournament with a 9 to 9 tie with Montenegro. I think our team played very well and we learned a lot about our opponents and also learned what we need to work on together as a team to improve.
After the tournament our coach made two cuts from 18 players to 16 players left training for the Olympic team. We will travel with a roster of 13 players to the Olympics, so there are still 3 more cuts that will happen in the upcoming months. Jeff Tyrell and Janson Wigo were the two players that were cut. I want everyone to know that they will be missed and that they are still considered a part of our team. Without their contribution to the team day in and day out we would not be as good as we are right now. They are two players that gave 110 percent every day in practice and pushed other players to raise their level of play.
This past weekend we had a meet and greet at various Simon Malls throughout California. I want to thank all of our fans for coming out to the different malls to get photographs and autographs with the men’s and women’s team. I am sure there will be more opportunities coming up for our fans to see us in action and we cannot wait to see all of you there.
Next weekend we are off to Serbia to train with Partizan water polo club. Partizan is considered to be the best Serbian water polo club team in the world. We will be training with them for 8 days. It should be another great marker to see how our team is performing against top level competition. It will give us a chance to work on different tactics and help us build more team chemistry. It will also be nice to be traveling to Europe together once again. Anytime we travel together we become closer. The reason for this is we are together 24 hours a day, which is a good thing. When we are at the Olympics we will be together 24 hours a day for almost a month.
I will write again after the Serbia trip to let all of you know how it goes. Thank you for all of your support.