Many people in life suffer from a "Case of the Mondays." Simply meaning that it is the beginning of the work week and they were not ready for their weekend to be over and grind of the 40 hour (in France 35hour) work week to start again. But when your job is to "Play Hockey", you don't get these, and for us in Epinal, we were happy to get started with the new week and get focused for our game tomorrow night against Amiens.
Today was a pretty good day for our team. We were right back to business and trying to get that loss on Saturday night out of our heads. I was up at 730am to head to a physio appointment. There is this great Boulangerie right next to the physio office and I always get lured in there to buy a "pain au chocolate" or "chaussons aux pommes" the smell is just intoxicating, way better than the smell of grease coming from McDonalds on Tecumseh Road in Windsor as you pass by Chryslers.
After physio it was right to the team workout at the Jorky Ball. I have been running the team workouts this year and for a change today, to lighten the environment a bit, I set up a Jorky Ball Tournament with our team. Confused yet? Ok Jorky Ball is played like soccer with 2 vs. 2 in a small glass court with nets built into the walls. Kind of like a squash court but with turf. We played 3 on 3 for numbers sake. I set up the teams with based on Nationality. Due to the large number of Slovakian players, we were forced to split them up into 2 separate teams, along with a Czech tossed in there. My team was with 2 of my 5 roommates Ryan Caicco (Canadian) and John Paulson (USA). There were 5 teams total and our first match up was against the home sided French players, comprised of Benoit Quessandier, Fabien Leroy and Erwan Agostini (roommate). The heavily favoured French team flopped losing to the North Americans 4-0. I am not going to recap the whole tourny, but the veteran squad of Captain Jan Plch, Peter Slovak and Jan Simko took the title. Arguably with their toughest match being a 1-0 win over my squad. Honorable mention went to team #5 comprised of 2 Finnish players, 1 Serbian and 1 French player. It was an uphill battle from the start, with such a short tourny the Geographical differences proved to be a draw back (they really lacked chemistry).
The afternoon was off, I used today to catch up on some sleep from our long trip back on the bus saturday night. A good 3.5 hour nap did the trick! Then it was off to practice this evening. Upon arriving, Fefe Marciano, our assistant coach, comes into the room with tracksuits for us to try on, he has M, L, and XL. Should be good right, we try it on then tell him which fits us best. Ya well the only problem is that the M and XL were Men's sizes but the L was a kids size. So obviously I throw on the kids L to be funny and as I am walking around like a College student in a children's Spiderman Suit on Halloween, Fefe walks into the room and loses it on me! I tried to explain that it was a kids Large but he was pissed, "tu me fait chier!!!" he yelled out, don't try to translate that because word for word it means "you make me shit!!!" so ya, the translation would mean something like "you are a pain in the ass." After assuring me that they only made a kids Large and my only options were M and XL he finally called the President and found out he grabbed the wrong tracksuit. I will try on my Men's L tomorrow!!!
Off to bed, morning skate then big game vs. Amiens!!!
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