POSTKARTEN AUS EUROPA
Will Sviteks Tagebuch aus Europa  -  Prolog - Eintrag 1 - Eintrag 2
Transcription by Joachim Haas of the Frankfurt Galaxy

Prologue - Entry 1 - Entry 2
Friday, February 24, 2006

Hello again everybody…

We’re a week and a half into training camp now and I can definitely tell. The daily grind is in full force. It’s always at this point that you lose track of what day of the week it is because it doesn’t matter. Every day is the same.

We had our first scrimmage against the Rhein Fire on Tuesday. It was fun to hit somebody else besides your own teammates for a change. Plus, it broke up the monotony of camp a little. I thought the scrimmage went well and that we were really gelling on offense.

The thing I really need to challenge myself with is always using the proper technique. A lot of times I just try to win my individual assignment and battle by competing. You can get away with that in NFL Europe, but I know that once I get back into the NFL that won’t fly. The defense will exploit you if you don’t focus on the proper technique on every play. The goal is to hone those techniques so they become second nature by the time I get back to Kansas City.

My coach with the Frankfurt Galaxy is Ronald “Whitey” Jordan. He’s actually a legendary coach here in NFL Europe. He’s considered the best offensive line coach in the league, so it’s a big treat to play for him. He’s 69 years old and he’s been coaching for 49 years. So he’s got plenty of experience. He family friends with Chuck Cook, the Chiefs Director of College Scouting. He’s big on fundamentals, drills and working hard, so it’s been a treat working with him.

Another little interesting tidbit about him is that he actually coached Elvis Presley in high school. So that’s got to be an interesting story and I can’t wait to hear every minute of it. We’ve been strategically waiting for a really hot day of training camp to ask Coach Jordan for the story. We figure we’ll wait for a tiring, tough practice, then let him tell the whole Elvis saga and stall the practice. I’ll be sure to pass on all the details whenever he tells us.

We had part of last Sunday off, so on Saturday night we got to go out and experience Tampa a little bit. It was a good time. Sunday a group of about six offensive linemen went to the Tampa Bay Storm Arena League football game. It was my first time ever going to an Arena League football game and I thought it was fan-friendly and an action-packed experience. It’s a lot different than the outdoor game. It’s too bad I’ll miss out on the Kansas City Arena League team this year since I’ll be in Europe during the whole season, but I know KC has great football fans so I’m sure they’ll be out to the support the Brigade. It was nice to see someone else beating up on each other while we sat back with a Coke and hot dog for a change.

It’s kind of tough because we’re kind of stranded here. Nobody has cars, so in order to go to Wal-Mart with my buddy the other day we had to take a taxi. That wasn’t a big deal, but getting a taxi ride home was. We just wanted to get a few snacks and necessities for camp, but after calling for the taxi ride home we waited for an hour with no one showing up. We needed to be back soon for meetings, so we just started asking everybody for rides. Nobody wants to pick up two 6-6, 300-pound men and take them in their car full of groceries. So everyone was pretty much ignoring us.

We finally found a very nice elderly lady who said that we ‘seemed like nice young gentlemen’. So she ended up saving the day and giving us a ride back to our hotel in her old, beat-up mini-van. I thought it was going to break down on the way and I figured we’d be out there pushing her home. She had to be over 80 and I swear the car seemed to be almost as old. But she was great and she did it out of the kindness of her heart. We tried to offer her money and she refused. She saved the day after everyone else ignored us. Rightfully so I might add. I wouldn’t have picked us up either if I saw us standing outside a Wal-Mart.

So that’s my story of hitch-hiking at NFL Europe training camp.

Until next week…

Will