(Insert Date Here)

Well, it’s been a slow week as far as tournaments and events go for the illini, but our training is going into high gear. We have 2 ½ weeks til terminus. This is the time to rev it up and push your body to the limit. The crossfit, while the epitome of our workout routine, is not the end all, be all of our training. Push yourself in other aspects of practice as well. Sprint through the drills and show some hustle even when you think you can afford to catch your breath. Half the battle of getting through Sunday with all our marks in the win column comes from the mentality of always pushing through even when it seems unnecessary. Develop this mentality in practice.

Final cuts for the A-team took place last week. Looks like I stole a few more readers away from the boomland blog. It’s kinda funny that you three were some of the first to rip phonebooks. I bet you feel silly.

Now, if I can be serious for a moment, we want to build ourselves into a program. A team is bigger than any individual, and a program is bigger than just one team. In order to accomplish this, we need to develop a forward looking mentality. We need to think of ourselves as more than a few star players or a team with just the right “mix”. We use to talk about being a “faceless army”, a team so good that no other team could match up to every one of our players at the same time. This is a start.

Everybody on both teams is involved in every play. You might say it was Pat that caught the disc in the endzone at vegas or it was Joel that got a sick layout d at mardi gras, but that’s not true. If Pat or Joel had no one to practice against or play with, they wouldn’t be good (well Joel might be mediocre, but Pat would definitely suck). Everyone is part of every play. This also includes mistakes. One person isn’t responsible, we all are. Maybe if you had pushed yourself harder in practice or focused a little bit better, your teammates would have worked harder too. Now, this is not to say that everything you do should be confined to a single role of what you do for the team. Make yourself better. The better you get as an individual, the better the team gets as a whole. My point is simple: practice like you’re going to play every point of the next tournament, because that’s exactly what you are doing.