Hey Guys,

I hope everybody is doing great back in Minnesota! I know it's been a while since my last blog but we've been pretty busy here in WA. After our week in Victoria, we headed over to the west coast and spent a week in the Freemantle and Perth area. We trained a couple of days with the Yankeroos, from the Notre Dame campus of Freemantle on the south Freemantle oval and a couple of days with the CBC Freemantle football club as well, which is a pretty good team in a competitive league in and around Perth and Freemantle. We also spent some time up at Subiaco Oval, the home of the West Coast Eagles and the Freemantle Dockers.

Early in the week we went over to meet up with Cameron Knapton to talk about the details of our trip and some of the expectations we should have throughout the rest of the trip. The second time we went there we got to go down onto the field for a kicking lesson with Rob Wiley, and we were on the field when the eagles were down there too, so that was really cool to be on the field at the same time as an AFL team.

In our free time we spent a bit of time at the beaches, Cottesloe and Leighton, and spent a bit of time with the study abroad students from csb/sju getting acquainted with the nightlife. After our week in Freemantle, we headed down to our respective towns, Mergen to Denmark and myself to Mt. Barker. The first week my team had a bye, so it was good to get in a bit of training before my teams first game. Our coach, Merv Neagle, arrived on thursday night and so we were only able to train with him once before the first game.

One highlight from the first week of training was that on the night of my first training, the first thing after training I was handed a beer in the locker room. At first I thought that it was a bit odd to be having a beer directly after training on a tuesday night, but that's how the teams do it over here. The guys who play on the team come from a ways away and don't live right in town, so they spend a bit of time after the training sessions catching up the rest of the guys on the team.

I hope the weather is behaving back home and good luck with the 5K coming up!

 - Tiger