First ID Practice

Today was the first official Iron Dragons tryout practice of the 2015-2016 season. So exciting! Several notable events occurred, all of which I will not necessarily describe here.

We, the coaches, figured that as 4/7 coaches would not be able to make any practices other than today’s, it’d be best for the coaches that would be able to make the other practices to take the lead on water training in order to maintain consistency. We ended up having 3 groups of two boats at a time, rotating among boat time, land training, and icebreaking activities. In order to maintain consistency throughout the day as well, we decided to keep the same coaches on the water all day. I was left with the task of running the land training and icebreaking activities (I only did icebreakers with 2 groups as Desmond ran the third).

I thought the land training went pretty well, and a few rookies stood out to me as particularly hard-working, as well as a few that were noticeably very encouraging with their teammates, a trait that I appreciated. I found out later from Desmond that two people threw up, so maybe it didn’t go as well as I thought it did. Either that, or they just happened to push themselves extra hard. I did ask Raymond if the land training was fun and he stared at me incredulously and was like “Uh, no, actually not at all.” But Raymond’s a bit of a baby, so who knows, really. Funny story, when I talked about land training after we did our icebreakers, Raymond was like “what, that wasn’t land training?!” and then flopped over on the ground on his back with his arms out and started rolling around, crying (he didn’t actually cry but it was something close to it).

I love seeing people push themselves, work really hard, and push each other to work hard. I love that kind of work ethic, perseverance, and drive and it’s something that I think this year’s rookies have in abundance. I have high hopes for this year’s recruits and think that it’s going to be a fun year.