Happy Belated Easter ILWT Readers,
This weekend the Denver Outlaws traveled to Severna Park, Maryland to participate in a couple scrimmages in preparation for the season opener next weekend in Boca Raton Florida.
After arriving at BWI Airport Friday night my favorite fogo, Nick Maggio and I made our way south to our hotel in Annapolis. We were fortunate enough to arrive at a decent hour and were able to revive a timeless Merrimack pre-game tradition, dinner at Bertuccis! After reminiscing of the good old days in North Andover and listening to Maggio swear up a storm over the Sox getting spanked by the O’s we shot back over to the hotel to rest up for Saturday’s scrimmages. A few guys coming from the west coast weren’t as fortunate with their travel arrangements and didn’t end up getting in until 2 or 3 am.
Saturday morning everyone got together in the hotel lobby and we carpooled over to Severna Park’s beautiful athletic facility. We arrived as the Charlotte Hounds were finishing up practice and were guided to our locker room for the day. We got suited up and had an hour long practice prior to our first scrimmage. Practice consisted of some shooting, a few minutes of unsettled 4 v 3s and 5 v 4s then we went through some X’s and O’s before wrapping up practice and taking an hour break before the first scrimmage.
In our first scrimmage of the day we took on the Chesapeake Bayhacks, coughcough, wait I mean Bayhawks. I’m not sure if their poles just woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning or maybe just thought they could intimidate us with unnecessarily late slashes. Either way everyone at this level has taken a beating in their day and we all know that’s part of the game so it didn’t matter much. All around I think we played well, we could have been a little cleaner on the offensive side of the ball but our faceoff guys dominated the X, our goalies played outstanding and our D looked great. We ended up taking that one by a five or six goal margin, I don’t think an official score was kept for either scrimmage.
After the Chesapeake scrimmage we switched spots with the Florida Launch and moved over to the other field to take on the Charlotte Hounds. We carried our momentum from the first scrimmage into this one and never looked back. I think we improved on the offensive side of things and once again our faceoff guys, defense and goalies played great. The highlight of the day in my opinion came from a sleep deprived Ethan Vedder. Ethan was one of those guys who didn’t end up getting to the hotel on Friday night until 2 or 3 am. Switching between long stick middie, close defense and short stick d-mid all day, Ethan found himself with a short stick in his hands on our defensive end. Our goalie made a nice stop and got it into Ethan’s stick maybe a yard or two behind our own goal. Ethan weaved his way through Charlottes riding attack switching hands multiple times and began looking for an outlet once he crossed the midline. With Charlotte doing a good job covering his outlets Ethan continued towards the goal on our offensive end.
With his stick back behind his ear looking like he was going to find an outlet at any second, this essentially froze Charlotte’s D who was trying to read where he was going to go with the ball, he eventually found a wide open Chris Bocklet who had made a nice back door cut and buried on the doorstep. I think we ended up winning by a 6 or 7 goal margin to cap off a great start to our season.
