Complacency the seed of failure

Last week my current team matched up against a cross city rival, the Zagreb Raiders. It was a intense and hard fought game for both teams and even though both teams played hard the Final outcome was 19-3 in favor of my team the Zagreb Thunder.
      Every week is a new experience for me and honestly I have no clue what to expect, so as you might expect I am looking forward to new games every week like a kid at a candy store.  This was the first game that my stupid lingering ankle injury did not keep me from running outside the pocket and making some ground action happen. One highlight includes a 74 yard scramble that ended up on the 1 yard line with me in pain and a Zagreb Raider with a hand full of hair......
     The reason I title this complacency is the seed of failure is because after a great game and a excited and re-energized Zagreb Thunder, Tuesday and Thursday had an average of 15 players at practice......(That is a number that will cause any true lover of American football to grind their teeth and be just as frustrated as their coach) Especially because this weekends match up is the Ljubljana Silverhawks, arguably the best team in the Central European Football League (CEFL). And just because we got a victory against the Raiders does not mean that the Silverhawks are going to just lay down and take it easy on us this week.......
    Matter of fact, it looks like my team will pad up 19-25 players to compete at a level that the Thunder have not seen in the 2012 season. Week by week, I stress at all team meetings and practice wrapups the danger of mistranslating potential for success....for there are many many talented players and people with potential that are flipping burgers and sitting on coaches watching the players and people excel at things that they were much more equipped to be great at but because of cancerous complacency.........are not doing anything with all the potential that was given to them.  That my friends is why I feel I need to remind my boys as well as my readers....complacency.....is......the.....seed.....of......failure.

Last weeks W is in the bank, now we have to go earn another one.

THUNDER READY. #HIT/BREAK

Games Games Games and more Games (RECAP TIME)

                                                           Thunder VS Patriots

Post game talk with Cannons

Thunder VS Generals

The 2012 football season in Croatia has been a bumpy one to say the least. Despite some adversity we are sitting on a 2-1 Croatian record. As you might have read in a prior post I managed to find myself with a level 3 ankle sprain 5 days before my first official game of the season. Oh the irony....yes I know.  But despite my injury and also a torn Achilles tendon on our other import, the Zagreb Thunder have seemed to rise from our hard circumstances and played some good football and got a couple wins. :D

 The first team we played were the Zagreb Patriots, a well coached and heavily stacked team in comparison. (player numbers, imports, etc) despite me being a little above crippled this game our team managed to rise to the occasion and play semi well vs the what seems to be outright better football team. The final score of this game was 33-0, a score that does not reflect a couple Thunder trips to the red zone and hard fought battle between cross town rivals.

The next game was vs a struggling program the Osijek Cannons, the coaching staff and I knowing that this game was going to be one of our less strenuous games decided that I should not play much because of my recovering ankle but because of an injury to our QB I went in at the end of the game and with a game total of about 8 plays managed to score a touchdown and help lead our team to victory.    The Zagreb Thunder showed flashes of great potential with a couple of very well executed plays and intensity but still lacked the full comprehension of our playbook, (offense and defense).

A week after these 2 Croatian League games, we took a bus to play an international game in Slovenia. Week 3 of the 2012 season we padded up to play the Maribor Generals. This is a team with a talented Slovenian National team ready QB. But this proved to be a challenge on our defense considering we brought 20 total players to the game and ZERO corners but we played relatively good football in comparison to the adversity. I had never in my life felt this shorthanded, but after a 35-18 loss, I was actually quite proud of the guys that came to play because the players with almost no experience in pass coverage managed to do a pretty good job. For me personally this was the first game that I was able to be semi mobile on my ankle and because of that stayed in the pocket as QB most of the game and passed for maybe 200+ yards 1 TD and had 1 rushing TD. Not phenomenal stats, but......starting to show that, Mr. Jones is healing. :)

A run of bad luck...

      The first couple months of Croatia in have been overall amazing! I mean how can I complain while I am in one of the most beautiful places in the world helping people learn to play the most wonderful sport in the world and getting paid to do it. I promise I cant complain.

      But what I can be frustrated about is a run of bad luck all at once. The team I am currently coaching and playing for is the Zagreb Thunder. They are historically the first American Football club in Croatia. Since there inception a couple teams have spawned off of them and another couple popped up in other large city's across the nation. The Zagreb Thunder have lots of good things going for them. I mean, they have lots of things that teams would love to have, a core of great hard working guys willing to learn, they have the will power to grow, a little money behind them and even a couple dedicated people really working hard to help the club thrive. 

     But what they also have in 2012 is......terrible terrible luck.   Before coming to Zagreb I was constantly reminded about the talent at wide receiver, and because of that I decided that the spread offense would be the best for the team. Sounds great right??? Well in theory it is!!! But what happens if you lose all your receivers!?!?

     Since joining the Zagreb Thunder I have lost many many core players to plain and simple STUPID BAD LUCK. Some of that bad luck being key players moving away to other city's to work but most of it being...just plain old INJURY......even though as a football player we are used to losing guys periodicity throughout a season, no one plans for the kind the Zagreb Thunder has had to deal with. In 2012...

    

 The Zagreb Thunder has lost participation of 5 of our primary receivers.......Losing 2 to jobs, and 3 key guys to injury, including our hard working president/tight end. Because of this we as a club are left with a few brand new guys, most of which are brand new to American football. On top of that the Zagreb Thunder also lost BOTH American Imports including Jovon Williams (Arizona St) and myself and this is no where close to  everyone that is banged up. 

   

  I cant lie, at first I was frustrated beyond belief, maybe even a little depressed, but now I understand that despite our circumstances we as a team can do nothing but get stronger because of this adversity!!!

      

    Our new receivers are going to have to STEP UP and rise to the occasion! To be totally honest I am  nervous but at the same time extremely excited for a chance to be the lucky one guiding these new guys along this unbeaten path!!! It will be my honor to help groom these new players to become the best that they can be. For the Zagreb Thunder is not 1 man 2 men, 10, 20, 30 or 40 men, the Zagreb Thunder is the root of all American football in Croatia and I am proud to be the person bearing the responsibly of watering it, even at the moment where adversity creeps in! 

     We cannot forget that "Calm seas don't make skillful sailors." So we are going to keep on working with what we got and doing the best we can. So that when we go home and look ourselves in the mirror we know that we gave it our very very very best.  

"Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are." -Arthur Golden

No matter how the season unfolds this year, I am looking forward to playing with this great group of guys and am looking forward to both the victory's and challenges that lie ahead!!!!   

THUNDER READY, HIT BREAK!!!

"Plitvice lakes" AKA Garden of Eden.

The last 2 weeks in Croatia have been great, as I posted in my last blog, I picked up my wife in Budapest and she was staying with me for 2 weeks. :D It was a blast! Unlike a couple wife visits in the past this time we stayed non stop busy. Trips and practices and meetings out the wazoo, but just as it was tiring it was equally rewarding! As you see in the pictures above we visited the Plitvice Lakes here in Croatia, roughly 2 hours from my apartment. Let me go ahead and tell you....I walked about 1000 miles during this visit but for every mile i walked it was worth 4!!! THIS PLACE IS INDESCRIBABLE. I cant put it into words the way this place looked beautiful, wonderful, peaceful, majestic, breathtaking....man so many adjectives fail to measure up in comparison to what these lakes have in store for there visitors! I admit even though I am a self proclaimed "good photographer" LOL I failed to capture the beauty of this place. Believe it or not my wife Jonna (SUPER WORLD TRAVELER 5000) was even in shock to the majesty of this place. She even admited that it was if not the best which it might be but at least one of the most beautiful places she has ever seen! And dont forget this girl has been to every continent besides South America! ;) So she is borderline nature appreciation expert. These last 2 weeks have been wonderful and I am extremely glad I chose the Zagreb Thunder for 2012, from Zagreb to Budapest and Budapest all the way to the lakes of Plitvice and the shoreline of Split...Southern Europe is... WONDERFUL. But dont take my word for it, check out these pics!

Buda-best!

I have to admit I was really excited for my weekend in Budapest and you might ask yourself was I let down....... NOT AT ALL! Besides the drug dealer asking me and Jonna if I wanted to buy crack rocks the first night we were there, everything was beyond my expectations. First off it was a beautiful 6 hour train ride with a beautiful view of one of Europe's most famous lakes, Lake Balaton. The water looked great, and in the future I will have to spend a weekend on the lake soaking up the Hungarian culture. When I arrived in Budapest after quite the train adventure with some new friends, I quickly learned that Hungarians dont speak the best English. Imagine this- a handsome and charming Texan with long beautiful hair asking everyone and their dog if they speak English and.........he only finds like 3 people in the whole city and they were not even Hungarian....they were from Germany and Holland.This was frustrating but easily dismissable in comparison the amount of fun I had on this trip. I will not rant on and on about things to much, so I will do like always, leave you with some great pictures from the adventure. ;)

A weekend in Budapest.

NEXT STOP BUDAPEST!!!!

From every true European traveler I speak to, there are a couple of places in Europe that are must visits. One is Prague, the other is Rome, and one that I have always heard of and really wanted to visit was...yep you guessed it. BUDAPEST! :D I will travel by train from Zagreb to Budapest tomorrow to pick up my Finnish wife, Jonna <3 It will be great to see her since it has been almost a month since I flew to Croatia for the football season. Like you might know, It is always great to meet up with missed loved ones, but it is even better to meet up with them in BUDAPEST :D while staying at a 4 star hotel and hitting the city up like Mohamed Ali. Wish me luck! When traveling in Southern Europe you never know what you are going to get!!!!

Croatia National Team Camp 2012

Hard working, smart, willing to learn, talented, selfless, players everywhere!

That is the best way to describe the Croatian National Camp of 2012. I have had the privilege to coach and play all over Europe and I have to say that the 90-100 guys that showed up to the 2012

CAMP were all true American Football Players! The willingness to learn and passion was everywhere. It was truly a honor to coach at this camp along side great coaches like Mike Mitchell (DeAnza College/Humbuldt St. University), John Trana(Hudson Valley CC), Jacob Palaniuk, and John Anderson. I was the Running Back coach and had the opportunity to work with some great guys. But instead of ranting on and on I will leave you with some pictures and a video! ENJOY!

http://youtu.be/7dTM2fPZkTM