BOLTNAR: MENTORING THE MENACE >>

Friday, June 8, 2007

Our last weekend on the road has left me with mixed feelings. Our match against the Demize was a good accomplishment for us. We met our goal of winning and having fun, which is what we have been striving for as a team.

We had a great team meeting before, where Coach Mann spoke to us about several physical and psychological aspects of the game. It was a solid match for us, but my question to the team was, could it have been a larger win? I hope to see us work towards taking a more significant lead in matches such as Springfield. It felt great to win and made me look forward to playing St. Louis the following night.

All games are a challenge, but road games are even tougher for a variety of reasons. We didn’t arrive in St. Louis until early Sunday morning and even though we had all day to rest, it is still a challenge to be in your best shape when you play back to back road games.

Coach Mann and I decided that it was in the team’s best interest if I didn’t start against St. Louis. I got crushed twice against the Demize the night before. I wasn’t concern about not starting because I trust everyone on the team. We decided that it would be best to have fresh legs on the field and that seemed to work well for us.

Although St. Louis scored early on in the first half, I felt like we made a strong comeback. I was happy we came back as a team to tie things up. The Lions came back and scored twice on us, to finish the match.

It was an extremely disappointing loss for us, because we needed to win both matches on the road this past weekend for better placement in the Conference race. Although this has been a building season for us, I will never get used to losing.

Our team is struggling with finishing our matches and just putting away a win. I am still pleased with the way we played. We create the opportunities to score; we just need to work on finishing them. It is much harder to practice creating those opportunities. We will improve and we just need to score some goals!

This week has been a great practice week. We continue to come together as a team and are anxious for another chance against St. Louis (exhibition) and Colorado this weekend in our home stadium.

- Tomas