Pan Ams 2011

After having eight weeks at home together, Team USA is back on the road in Guadalajara, Mexico. It has been a busy but exciting time for the team. We have not had this much time together since 2008. The reason for this is that most of our guys go to Europe and play professionally and we don’t see them until May or so. At that point we have a few short weeks to prepare for our summer. This year is different. All of the players have agreed to stay home and train together through Pan Ams and into next year for the Olympic Games. We have been able to do this because so many people have stepped up and helped support us. We had a fundraiser and we will have one more in March of next year. The money raised at these fundraisers will go directly towards the athletes to help pay for food and housing.

I can tell you that I am super excited about having the whole team together for this entire year. This is the only way that we are going to win a gold medal next year. The team has been working super hard to get ready for this first step towards London. The Pan Am Games is our Olympic qualifier. We need to win a gold medal here to qualify for the Olympics next year. We are ready to do it.

We traveled to Houston on Sunday. This was the city chosen to process and outfit all the athletes as they traveled to Guadalajara. We flew out of LAX early on Sunday. Processing and outfitting took about an hour and a half. Our team planned a nice dinner in town and we all enjoyed some great Texas steak ( a few of the guys ate fish). After a short night sleep we were off and running again. With a large group of athletes processing yesterday (there were two full buses that left for the airport) we had to load up at 6:30 and head to the airport. Lots of lines and waiting around but we finally arrived in Guadalajara around 1:30 pm. The drive to the village was another 40 minutes and by the time we made it to our rooms it was almost 3 pm.

Although, we missed our training time at the practice pool, we got a great workout in at the gym and swam for about 45 minutes at the pool in the village. Tomorrow we will travel to the training pool twice (once in the morning and once in the afternoon). Back to work....

We all know that we have a job to do here and we are ready to do it. The schedule has us starting on October 23rd and the finals are October 29th. We will have a total of five games and we expect to win them all. We will not take anyone lightly. We are on a mission to dominate these games and come home with a gold medal and qualify for the Olympics.

Here is the Pan American Games team.

Merrill Moses
Peter Varellas
Peter Hudnut
Jeff Powers
Adam Wright
Brian Alexander
Layne Beaubien
Tony Azevedo
Ryan Bailey
Tim Hutton
Jesse Smith
JW Krumpoltz
Chay Lapin

I will keep you all posted as to how our training and preparation is going as we get closer to competition. That’s it for now.

See you at the pool.

Coach