Senior Mens Football - 2004

This is a short newsletter to keep you up to date with what we have planned for the early stages of the 2004 season.

Pre-season training will begin on Thursday February 5 at the Domain. From then on we will train at Pohlen Park on Tuesday evenings and the Domain on Thursday evenings. All training sessions will start at 6.30pm and will last for approximately 90 minutes.

I will schedule a pre-season training camp to be held on a weekend in late February/early March. This will be open to all intending players and will involve: travelling to the venue on the Saturday, training in the afternoon/evening, having a good night out, staying the night, having a light training session on the Sunday before making our way home. I believe this will be important in helping to build the sort of team spirit a successful team needs so I hope you will all consider making yourselves available. Your costs will be kept to an absolute minimum and the weekend we go will be chosen to suit as many players as possible (hopefully everyone). More details will be available nearer the time.

I will also be looking to arrange four or five pre-season friendlies as well as our annual tournament before the season kicks off in April. This is a heavier workload than in previous seasons, so we may look to play some of these games on training nights. These matches will be important, however, as we have been very slow starters in recent seasons when the real games have got underway.

My hope is to work with a talented squad of players, who are willing to work hard and prepared to win a lot of games. There will be pressure on all squad members to train regularly, be punctual and put yourselves out for the team and your team mates, while still keeping in mind that we all have lives outside of football. In order to do well, though, it’s important we do things properly.

This is not meant to scare you off. Instead I hope you will embrace this philosophy. If we prepare properly we will win games and if we win games we will enjoy our football much more. And enjoyment of the game is a huge motivating factor for all of us. I hope you will experience and accept training sessions as a means to this end, rather than just putting up with them. If you think this makes sense then we will have an enjoyable, worthwhile and successful season of football, both on and off the field.

As one final thing, I’ve attached a quote from Vince Lombardi here, a legendary American Football coach. Make of it what you will, but I hope you find something of value in it.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me at any time if you have any questions. I look forward to working with you in 2004.

Kind regards,
Dwayne
phone a/h 07 888 9196
work 07 881 9060
email dwayne.jean@xtra.co.nz