The Boys Are Back in Town, But We're Leaving Again Friday!

It's so nice to be back in Boise.  The road trip to Long Beach and El Paso was a lot of fun, but it was also A LOT of bus travel, and sometimes the rigid schedule of a team's itinerary on the road gets old (wake up, eat breakfast, go back to sleep, eat pregame meal, go back to sleep, go to game, play, eat postgame meal, go to sleep, do it all over again) so it's nice to be back on my own schedule.  We had the day off on Monday, and yesterday, our coaches came on the ice and played with us in a 4-on-4 scrimmage.  We had the head coach on our team, and it was a really fun day of practice.  My team won.  I scored 4 goals.  No big deal.  And today we had another laid back practice, kind of getting back in the groove of things because we weren't able to practice at all on our 10 day road trip.  It was noticeable that we hadn't practiced in a while because we were all a little slow on the ice.  Tomorrow, though, our coach said we are going to have a tough practice.  We've had a few days to sort of mentally and physically recover from the trip, and it's time to get back at it.  We're going to do a lot of battle drills and competitive drills to get us ready for our 2 game series in Ogden this weekend.

I think the long road trip really brought us together as a team, as it should when you travel with the same people for so many hours.  Before the trip, there were definitely some cliques on our team, which I think is natural for any team.  But I can honestly say that we've become a lot more unified after our big road trip.  I think those games were an important step for us.  6 games in 9 nights is hard.  But we did it, and we didn't lose a game in regulation.  Good teams have to be able to win on the road, and we did that.  We had a lot of learning experiences on the trip, like when we let a 4 goal lead slip in Long Beach and when we realized in El Paso that sometimes refs are going to "homer" us, but we played through those challenges, and took a big step together.  Now, we have to keep this good thing going.  No mental lapses this weekend in Ogden.  Ogden is a team we should beat, but those games are usually the most dangerous.  In any case, we're back on the road again on Friday.  At least it's only a 4 hour trip this time, though.  That's a cake walk compared to the 22 hour trek to El Paso.