Dayton Flyers

Aug. 24, 2007

By Zach Weiss

As the second day of classes kicked off, the team's day began bright and early once again as we started the beep test at 7 a.m. There were still some fatigued faces at this morning fitness session as we were still overcoming the bumps we took during the game against Kentucky on Monday. But we managed to overcome this as we pushed ourselves to pass the days test.

Although our legs felt like cinder blocks after this session with Thobe, we immediately found ourselves finishing up our final lifting test of squat maxes after a very short break. Things were moving along seemingly smooth in the weight room until we were all flustered by the lights and noise of the fire alarm, forcing us to evacuate the building and stiffening our legs up once again.

After this morning workout, we all went about our days, hopping from class to class while battling the physical and mental fatigue of our extremely busy schedule. But being an upperclassman and having dealt with this struggle before, I feel that I have really improved and found many ways in which I can balance all of the class-work and toughness it takes to play ball at this level. In order to meet our expectations we must constantly stay organized and sharp to be successful while coping with this demanding pace of life in this first week of school and preseason.

Since the coaches took it fairly easy on us in training yesterday, we knew that we were in for a much more intense and fast-paced practice today. At today's afternoon session we began with some sharp 2v2 transitional defending and then moved into a larger 5v5 transitional game before finishing up with a quick full field game. We were once again pushed to the limit all the way until the final whistle of practice, raising our ever-increasing fitness level once again.

At this point in preseason I can really start to see some real improvements in our fitness and overall team chemistry. Although our legs are still fatigued, we all know that this kind of training only helps us to grow closer to our goals for the season as we saw in the game against Kentucky in which our fitness far excelled our opponents.

The new players are also really starting to open up to the team more and more every day, which seems to be inevitable seeing that we have been around each other practically all day for the last couple weeks. The end of our preseason seems to be in sight but that does not mean our squad has any intentions of slowing down our progress.