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.

Old Dominion's First Struggle's

Everything seemed so perfect for the Monarchs after winning their first three games of the season. Unfortunately, it's not always that easy to win all of the games in Division 1AA football. The Monarchs ended up losing the next two game of the season putting them at a 3-2 record for the season. Yes, this is still a winning record, but not okay for us players. We felt we should have won all of our games up to this point. I asked my buddy Andrew Turner how he felt about the game and he said, "We should be 5-0 right now but that's not how things work out all the time. You win some and you lose some, but we are definitely a good team and will continue to become the best." 

Sure, we lost against two very worthy teams but that is no excuse. both games we had in our hands and we could have gotten the victories  but for some reason we made little mistakes at the end of the game that cost us.  We are a very young team, but we now know where we stand and can definatley play with the big boys. 

In the locker rooms it was a very interesting scene. Nobody on the team including myself felt as if we should have lost both of these games. We set a high standard for ourseles and expect us to be perfect right now. To me, thats the attitude of a winner. 

Players the next day were a bit upset, but nothing out of the ordinary. We did not panic in any way, yet we went back to being ourselves and joking around and staying loose just we have always been. Sure enough we find ourselves back to our winning ways the following week.

Come Back Win

Old Dominion defeated Jacksonville University with an incredible finish. The Monarchs failed 21-7 at the half and it looked like it was going to be a tough game to pull out. We played our first Division 1-AA opponent ever and ended up pulling off the upset victory by a last second field goal. We kept our composure throughout the entire game just like our coaches preach to us daily. Stay calm and do what we do. 

At half time, we seemed to be very exhausted and from the heat in Jacksonville. The temperature was 115 degrees and extremely tough to play in. The coaches made adjustments at half time and told us that we are doing fine and keep playing our game and we will be fine. The coaches did not seem frustrated at all at half time inside the locker rooms. They believed us the whole time that we could come away wiht this victory and sure enough we did just that.The heat definitely took its  toll on us for a second but we were able to pull it off. Thomas DeMarco hit Dorian Jackson for the last second touchdown to give us the advantage that eventually got us the victory. 

Old Dominion beat Jacksonville University 28-27 on a hot and very humid Saturday after noon. We ended up having a 91 yard drive with two minutes left in the game to score our final touchdown of the game that gave us the victory. 

ODU 1st Football game 9/5/09

 Old Dominion has played its first football in almost a century this weekend and boy, was it a great one! The football has been preparing for this first game for a very long time now and it definitely paid off.  Old Dominion's first football team opened up against Chowan University and beat them 36-21. 

The atmosphere at Foreman Field at S.B. Ballard Stadium was absolutely astonishing! For a start up program that is totally new, selling out 20,000 tickets is unheard of. But yet, Old Dominion did just that. The crowd was so loud and the football players had a blast! As a member of the football team, everyone that suited up for the big game couldn't wait to get out there and feel the energy that the crowd brought to the game. I had goosebumps up and down my spine and it was awesome. 

Marquel Thomas scored ODU's first touchdown of the season on a 50 yard reception from Thomas DeMarco in the first quarter on the second possession of the game. The place went absolutely nuts. Such an incredible feeling.  ODU hosts Virginia Union next Saturday.