We started today with a team meeting regarding our goals and our trip to China. The team was fairly excited and ready to go but a few are still down because they didn't make the first 12. For the most part though we are ready to go. Not on the court, but off it. The Chinese trip will be an adventure for sure. The other 2 staff members that have been there are trying to get people ready for it. The "little things" they are mentioning are having to squat over a hole in some places to go to the bathroom and having to place the used toilet paper in a basket beside the hole. Other "little" things like people spitting all over the place, being very loud when they eat, a foul stench that hangs in some places and being served a plate full of pigeon heads. Sounds very fun. The other things we talked about was taking certain food with us to be prepared for the differences. Linda, our head coach, also mentioned the mental stresses and that sometimes players have broken down and cried and didn't know why due to the changes in their stress level and body clock.
We finally got our schedule today. We fly on the 15th for 14 hours and arrive on the 16th. We play on the 18th in Jiyuan in Henan Province. On the 20th we play in Jiangyin in the Jiangyu province. On the 22nd we play in Zhangjiagang. The hotels look nice according to their websites so we should be OK with the accommodations. The food and travel should be interesting to say the least. We fly back on the 23rd into Toronto and I return to Cape Breton on the 24th.
The girls will be excited for this trip but after practice I am not sure it will be very much fun on the court. We have 11 players and 3 of them seem a tad out of place. Another 5 days of practice will help with this. We certainly have some talent but against a team that is expected to possibly win an Olympic medal, we will be in deep. We will not have a great deal of size against their front line and our weakest position may be at point guard so it will be an adventure.
Tomorrow we play a boys team at 11AM and then practice in the evening. We will also play a boys team in a few days and then the Junior Women's National team the day before we go. We need the experience to get our kids to gel.
This evening we had a nice break as a local coach named Ralph May invited us to his house. HE has been watching training camp all week so he invited us to meet his family and have a beverage or two. The coaches had some wine and a beer or two while we dined on some incredible dessert that Ralph's wife made. A nice connection to our program is that Ralph coached and coached with Lindsey Smith.
So now that the team has been picked and the details are coming together we are getting ready. Tomorrow starts early with breakfast at 7:30 and our staff will meet at around 8am and I will watch the senior practice at 9am. After our scrimmage I will get to work breaking down the video so we can find ways to improve.
The journey continues
Coach
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