Little Things: Pre-season Expectations [ edit | delete ]
By Adam Knoll | April 12, 2010 at 12:55 PM EDT | No Comments (0 new)
We are now 10 days to our pre-season match-up, and I want to stress something very important:
This game does not matter.
It doesn’t go toward our win-loss record, it doesn’t go toward our stats, it doesn’t prove we are a good team, or a bad one. It is exactly what it is supposed to be; a warm-up against another squad. It’s a way to match up against someone who isn’t on our squad. I'm sure most O-Linemen are tired of blocking the same old D-linemen, and vice versa. I’ve personally had it trying to complete balls against our secondary; our running backs are fed up running into our linebackers. It’s pre-season and all we have done is trench fight for practice field yards. In a week and a half, that changes a bit, yet it does not claim to have real importance.
I’ll tell you an anecdote. Last season, we were…whew…full of ourselves. We had five pre-season games, ten regular season games, barely any rest in between (seriously, from our third pre-season game on, we had no break save for the 4th of July). Carry on top of that we had practiced weekly since November…it’s no wonder we lost steam. Anyway, we had a very over exemplified view of ourselves, and we took it into our first pre-season game against the then Mustangs. The Mustangs were such a new team they had to borrow our equipment just to play the game. They were so new they didn’t know the rules very well. They had no jerseys and their field had two lights, both from the same direction. The stars all pointed to us running them over.
We did, and we didn’t.
We DID jump out to a 20-6 lead; we DID knock them all over the field. Yet, we DIDN’T put them away, and a late score and an INT returned for a score tied up the contest. Our first pre-season game came out to a 20-20 tie.
It destroyed who we were, because we took the game far too seriously. The tie in our eyes wasn’t just a number on a game that didn’t matter; it was a scratch to our retinas. We yelled at each other at the meeting after the game, we left with our heads hung low. Not one person took the game for what it was; a learning experience. Sure, we all said the right stuff afterword ‘just a pre-season game’, ‘ Didn’t matter’, ‘Lending them equipment during the game threw us off’…yada yada. Not one person believed it.
As I walked off the field, wiping the sweat from two people out of my helmet (yes, me and the QB from the Mustangs shared my helmet…yuck), I felt horrible, I hadn’t played well at all. It was my first game back from knee surgery (I now own some dead guy’s ACL), and I was skittish a bit. I overthrew a lot of balls. But when I settled down we did okay. It was like that for a lot of guys. Remember how I said we practiced weekly since November? Well that means this was the first new people we hit in…6 months. That will throw you off a bit.
Yet did we take that into account? No, it truly crushed us mentally. Sure, in our other four pre-season games we went on to eradicate the Gators, beat the Gladiators, squeak by the Rage and lose to the cougars on the last play. But we played every game to win; none of them were pre-season games to us. We had to atone for the Mustangs pre-season game, that didn’t matter.
So remember this story when we play the Scorpions. I expect to win, and to perform well. Yet not everything will go the way we plan it…and you know what, that’s what this game is for. I want to walk off that field feeling good about ourselves, yet I also want to have something to learn because of it. We will use this game as a springboard for our first game of the actual season. Because that’s the one that truly matters.
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