Update

My time in Spain is coming to a close, but fortunately I've got 2 good weeks ahead of me. I come home on April 23rd, and I'm very excited to see all my family and friends, but I know that I will miss this place and the friends I've made here.

Anyways the last few weeks have been great here too. The weather is finally been consistent. Instead of beach days thrown into my schedule at random, it is now becoming more of an every day possibility. Haha, cannot complain with that.

We have played a football game since March 26, when we traveled up to Coslada to play the Camioneros. Coslada is right outside of Madrid and takes about 7 hours by bus. The game was Sunday at noon, so we got onto a bus here in Nueva Andalucia at 1130pm Saturday night. We made one stop about a half hour north to pick up a few more players... But something just wasn't right. Why were there only 21 people on the bus? I suppose that would have been fine if 2 weren't Mike's kids, one wasn't a player's girlfriend, 3 weren't friends coming for the bus ride to Madrid, and 1 wasn't a coach. Yeah. So that puts us at 14. One of which had never played a down of football in his life and had only been to one practice the night before. Haha, you can imagine the thoughts going through our head at this point.

At about 12:30am, someone decided to put on 'The Hills Have Eyes'. Hmm. Great idea! Haha. We had a game to play in less than 12 hours, no one has slept, and we're about to watch a horror movie. Ha. It ended by 2am or so and when someone tried to put on 'Disaster Movie' I had had enough and put a quick end to that.

So we arrive in Madrid around 8 o'clock (DST is 2 weeks after the states, and this happened to be the night we 'sprung ahead'! Lucky.) We put our stuff in the locker room and thought we were going to a team breakfast. Mike, our coach said,"Okay guys, its 815 now, be back by 10 to get ready for the game at noon." When asked about the team breakfast he replied, "Well, you have about two hours, so if you have some money I suppose you could go buy some breakfast." Haha. I got a kick out of that.

A contingent of about 8 start walking around this little outskirt town of Madrid. Unfortunately, in Spain, everything is closed on Sundays. And not actually every single place, but about 95% of places. After a decent hike, we find a coffee shops that serves coffee, juice, and churros (fried dough sticks). I really actually can't think of a better pre-game meal. We did end up finding a little sandwich shop after the churros, but it wasn't much better.

Gametime: 14 players. Now, if you know football, you know that it's not like soccer. You can't really play a football game with 14 guys. That would mean that just about every player is playing both ways and every special team. Insane. The one thing we had going for us was that they only had like 23 guys, which is also very difficult. Midway through the first quarter one of our players coming back from an ACL injury reinjured his knee and was out for the game. 13.

We actually put up quite a fight. Despite penalties and linemen going both ways, we hung in there and fought until the end. They were leading 26-14 when Zac threw fade to me in the endzone in the last few minutes for a touchdown. The final score was 26-20. We actually did have a chance at winning that game, which would have been nothing short of a miracle. We were missing our 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th string receivers, so after AJ, we put in our backup middle linebacker/defensive end to play wideout. We had a fullback who had never played fullback before. Of our secondary, we had 3 players from the original 7 linebackers and defensive backs from earlier in the season. Our offensive line fought hard and opened up some big holes for me to run through and I did alright carrying the ball. My shoulder held up too, so I'm happy about that.

We ended up having a very fun bus ride home. We had dropped our second game, which put us at 3-3-1 (we ended up having to take a forfeit for the game we missed due to travel isssues) but we were having fun playing football and hanging out together.

We have one game left, this upcoming Saturday against the Barcelona Bufals at home. This would have been a showdown for a chance to make the playoffs had things not fallen apart, but now it is solely our chance at redemption for the team that beat us a few months ago. They are the best team in the league, but I know if we have a better turnout with players, we do have a solid chance to beat them. I sent an email out to the team the other night, asking players to come together for one more game as a team. I addressed the fact that yes, while the season did fall apart, it was still a lot of fun. I had a good response and I think that we may end up having at least 20 players for this one. If that is the case, then I have a good feeling about it. It would be the perfect way to finish the season - and possibly my career. Who knows if I'll play another football game after this one?

Also, my ex-roommates Nery and Danny are coming on Friday for a week, so that's going to be great. And of course I can't let them down by losing.