Trying to make History

     Old Dominion University's football team is trying to make history this weekend against North Carolina Central who is a very solid team.  The game is already sold out and should be a great, first homecoming game for ODU.  

     No start up program as ever won eight games in their first season ever of play. We can do that this weekend and forever hold our names in the record books for as long as possible. We have worked extremely hard these past couple of months and want to win this game badly more than anything right now. 

     We hope that the "12th Monarch" will be out again and help us at the game this weekend. They have not let us down yet and we hope they are louder than ever this weekend because it is going to be a very tough game. We need all the fans support because they make it frustrating for other teams when they have the ball because they cannot hear anything which causes them to have penalties and miscommunications. 

     Gametime is Saturday at 2p.m. with homecoming festivities throughout the day as well.

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Injuries and More Injuries

     Well, every football team  knows that throughout the season they can expect injuries throughout the season. For us, that is definately the case. We are currently at week ten right now and hurting as a football team right now. The Old Dominion Football team is 7-2 right now and is going to face a good football team this Saturday against North Carolina Central this weekend. They are currently 2-6 right now but their record is deceiving because they have played tough teams this year so far. 

     We must come ready to play this weekend because they certainly will be. Not only must we play perfect football but we must play discipline football because we are a banged up bunch as well. Key injuries up to date are myself, Matt Carrillo (broken thumb, but still playing), A.T. Aeolua (ankle sprain), Ryan Jensen (Back problems) and others to name a few. The key part to our success in the next couple of weeks are the guys on the team who will be able to back up the starters who are injured and to see how good they can perform.  Erik Saylor just recently this week was injured after getting hit extremely hard and "pancaked" by Patrick McNichols. Saylor received a concussion on Wednesday and will be a game time decision this weekend.

Week 9

      Well ladies and gentlemen, the University of Old Dominion has had its first winning football season ever this year! The team has worked very hard and sure enough it all paid off. But, in order to succeed you must have failure first. We started off to an explosive start with three wins where we cruised to victory, but then hit a a few bumps in the road. We then dropped the next two games and sought to find answers quickly. We sure found them alright because we have won the next three games and don't plan on slowing down at all. 

     There are rumors that we could be the best "start up" football program to ever be assembled and quite frankly, we are! We have equaled the win total of the previous team that had the best record, but we still have three more games left in the season. Oh, and we plan on winning every one of them. So let me break it down for you, ODU has the second best fan turnouts at the games, we are the best start up program ever with the toughest start up program ever too. We are also getting national attention and are currently ranked number 46 in the nation. That is pretty darn good if you ask me. 

     Our coaches, Bobby Wilder has done a great job wit the team so far and is really trying to establish a championship program and it has been nothing but that since I have been here from California. Every one of our coaches is very discipline and teach us how to be disciplined as well. This has paid off because we are a very young football team and obviously we have been doing something right because we have beaten teams with seniors on them.  Old Dominion is going to be a problem for other schools in years to come!!!

Presbyterian and Campbell Crushed

Old Dominion beat Campbell and Presbyterian University the past two weeks. We defeated Campbell 28-17 for another big win. Coach preached to us the whole week that every team will come hard against us because they will be excited to play against us because of our crowd. We must be ready to play every home game because they will "bring it." At half time we were losing 10-7 but did not panic at all. We knew we could win the football game if we just kept doing what we were taught and play football. Sure enough we came away with the victory.

At halftime our offensive coordinator Coach Scott is usually full of energy and brings "juice" to get us pumped up. But this time at half time he seemed very relaxed and calm. He was happy with the way offense was playing even though we had only 7 points. We had one turnover but kept playing. He felt we had run and passed the ball good and sticking to the game plan. 

Presbyterian University came in with some attitude and played well. Unfortunately, playing well will not get the job done against the Monarchs. We ended up beating them 34-16. I ended up scoring my second touchdown of the season in the third quarter when the score was 14-10. I had a great game against them but I'm such a competitor I feel there is always room for improvement. 

The "toolbox" helped us out the past two weeks as you can see and we are definately going to look for tools we can bring with us to work to continue to make us a better football team.

Back "Tool" work

After our back to back loses our team looked for answers on ways to fixing our approach. We took the time to look at ourselves and see what was wrong by being our hardest critics. Sure it's not always the greatest to lose, but we can learn so much from our mistake so that we do not make the same mistakes twice. 

We have started our own kind of tradition that will take place for time to come I would assume. At practice the other day Coach Wilder came up to us before practice with something in his hand. From the looks of it we noticed he had a "toolbox." He brought a toolbox with him to practice telling us that we need to bring our "toolboxes" everyday to work with us to make us better. we need to work on specifics fundamentals and put that in our toolbox for the week sort of speak. Football is about work and we must be able to set everything aside and put all our energy and focus on football. Everybody on the team loved the idea and couldn't wait to get to work at practice. It's now become an everyday thing and it has helped because we won the last two games I guess you can say.