Dusseldorf Panthers Showdown Round 1

This past weekend we had our second game with the Recklinghausen Chargers. This was a back-to-back game since we had just played them last week in Recklinghausen. Well if you followed the scores of the game you know that we beat them pretty badly, 70-0 to be exact. It was quite a lopsided score and all our players got a chance to have a major contribution. Personally I didn’t play much offense and ended up with 1 catch for 20 yards. Defensively, our line and linebackers really controlled the game and I didn’t even have to make one tackle. Below is a sequence of pictures when I was returning a punt.








I can easily say this was the most uninvolved I have ever been in a football game but it was nice to see all of our teammates get on the field and be rewarded for the hours of hard work they put into our team. Unfortunately we lost another player to injury on Saturday; one of our receivers broke his ankle and will be out for a substantial amount of time. Hopefully with our break coming up he can heal up and be back on the field with us soon.

Naturally with the break coming up we are all getting excited for this vacation we are planning but we can’t get too far ahead of ourselves since we have our biggest game of the year on July 3rd. We play our rival the Dusseldorf Panthers; the winner of this game takes the lead in the league and holds the championship in their own hands. Dusseldorf has played one more game than us but they have a tie so if we win and close out the rest of the season in the same fashion as we have done so far we will have won the championship and get to play in the relegation game at the end of September to move up to the GFL. There is nothing else to say about the matter, this is a must win and then we can look farther ahead.

I also received the good news that two of my friends from Ottawa are visiting me in Monchengladbach, one is already here and the other gets here just in time for the Dusseldorf game. Its nice to get some friends from back home visiting and getting to see what I have been up in the last couple of months.

My parents, as well as my aunts and uncles will also be here the following week for my last game before the break. It was recently my mom’s birthday so it will be a nice celebration with the family together. This will also be the first time my aunts and uncles attend a football game so a new experience for them as well.

Yesterday, we went to the beach, this time with a bigger group and just relaxed after the big celebration from Germany’s victory over England. We spent the day lying around listening to music and playing beach volleyball not a bad time at all. It was pretty comical because at one point I lost my (cheap) sunglasses in the lake and kept diving down to try and find them but kept coming up empty-handed. Eventually I saw a lady with her son who had some diving goggles so I figured with my basic German I would try to convince her to let me borrow them for a couple of minutes so I could dive down and find my sunglasses. Eventually after a bunch of pointing at her son’s head and acting out diving in front of her (I am sure she thought I was a little crazy) I was able to borrow the goggles and retrieve my sunglasses.

My plans for the rest of the week are pretty low key since we have a big game this week but I will make a trip to Dusseldorf as well as Cologne to show my friend some of the sights to see in those areas. I am guessing I will end up climbing up the steps of the Dom but I can’t say I am looking forward to that, I really hate those tiny little spiral staircases. I can’t believe they send people up and down on the same staircase and of course the big people end up having to walk on the narrow part of the stairs, just great.

I will check back in a few days; drop a comment below, ask me a question or send me an email letting me know what your thinking.

World Cup, Vacation Plans and Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber

Since my last post I have played in a football game, visited some family, been to a medieval town, watched the German National soccer team win a big game against Ghana at a public viewing site which led to lots of celebration and managed to organize most of my month long vacation in July. The time was used productively, but not as interesting for posting on a blog. Let me give you a little run-through.

So we played another away game at Recklinghausen and won 35-0. The game was fairly uneventful, I caught a couple passes and got a touchdown. I played defense and offense again and the cool thing was that I got my first quarterback sack (when you tackle the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage) since high school or you could call it my first sack. We play Recklinghausen again this week but this time in Monchengladbach at 5pm Saturday night. As long as we all come to play we should win this game again. Here are a couple of pictures from last week’s game.






The morning following the game, my roommate Allan and I drove down to Southern Germany to the town of Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber. One of Allan’s teammates from Oregon State is playing there and he wanted to go visit him. I took the chance to go see my aunt and uncle living an hour away in Heilbronn and spent most of Sunday with them. Since they needed to work Monday, I drove back to Rothenburg Monday morning to meet up with the guys. We spent the rest of the day walking around this medieval village. Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber is an old fortress and the city is still surrounded by the wall that protected it long ago. We walked the entire length of the wall. I spent most the wall-walk ducking or walking hunched over since the roof on the wall wasn’t built for 6 foot plus people. Below are a few pictures of Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber.






Wednesday night the German soccer team had a game against Ghana that would determine whether they would move on to the next round of the World Cup or not. Soccer being the number 1 sport here, our coaches organized that we practiced earlier and then the team could watch the game together at the Hockeypark amongst the couple thousand people that came to watch the game on the Jumbotron screen. Germany prevailed with a 1-0 victory as those of you following the World Cup already know, and therefore will play against England on Sunday in the quarterfinals. If you followed my Twitter feed or my Facebook news feed there is a picture linked of the four-lane street outside my apartment full of people dancing and hanging out on the street celebrating the win. The riot police were called in to clear the people since no cars could drive by… Ironically most of the cars that were driving by or trying too at that time were team Germany supporters driving there cars in circles around the Altermarkt honking their horns, hanging out their car windows with flags and so on. They love the “beautiful game” over here.

Planning my vacation was a tough challenge; so many places to go and not enough time. I think I have done a decent job travelling around so far considering the schedule we have but most of my sightseeing has been in Germany. I am hoping to get to see some more places outside of Germany in the second half of my time here. During my vacation, I will be spending time in France, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Hopefully I survive travelling to all those countries during July and then I will be able to set my sights on London, Prague, Marrakesh, Munich (Oktoberfest), Warsaw, Luxembourg, Brussels, parts of Serbia and Croatia as well as some more time with my family before I leave in October. I realize visiting all those places in the little free time I have left probably isn’t realistic but I will give it a try anyways and get as many done as possible.

Drop a comment , send an email or let me know what your thinking.

Waterloo Scandal from a Different Angle

As many football fans now know the Waterloo Warriors football program has been suspended by the University of Waterloo following the results of team wide drug testing. The university decided to suspend next season after 9 players tested positive for banned substances. The university ordered the whole team to be tested following charges being laid by the Waterloo police against a player involving steroids and other illegal contraband.

Many people have chimed in and given their opinion on this situation and what could be done, how it could or should have been dealt with or how to prevent it. I have been reading responses on the Canada Football Chat and tsn.ca and many of them are placing all the blame on the school for making its decision to cancel the upcoming season.

Many people have been mentioning that this decision by the university has hung the clean student-athletes out to dry; I agree with those points and this decision will forever impact the members of the Waterloo Warriors football community. The university’s decision has stuck the student-athletes with tuition fees, apartment leases; it may have cost some athletes possible professional football opportunities as well as many other problems that these athletes are now facing.

I feel for these athletes and can sympathize to a certain extent. I have never been part of a steroid scandal but I did have to endure a scandal during my time in university. I personally never had a full season cancelled shortly before either my return to school or in my rookie year but my teammates and I at McGill University did have our season cancelled early and had the possibility of the season being cancelled hanging over us every day of that season.

The circumstances were obviously quite different because the Waterloo scandal deals with the decisions of individuals and the scandal we endured was a result of team decisions. For those of you unfamiliar with that scandal, we had to deal with a hazing incident; which the media used to slanderously attack players and the team without correctly gathering the facts of the event in question. The media is obviously a two-edged sword; sometimes the desired story gets published and other times its just looking for a big story.

I am in no way defending our team’s actions; but I do mention this experience of which I am not proud of because I believe it brings forward a similar dilemma. Waterloo University has now had to deal with a public relations disaster. McGill University also had to deal with a public relations nightmare during our scandal and in the end it also decided to cancel the rest of our season. By no means does getting to play 6 games and then have the season cancelled compare to losing the whole season but the universities decided the same fate for the football program. A university’s public image is crucial to its existence and therefore extreme actions follow when that image is tarnished or altered.

The institutions decided what they thought would be best for the image of the school, not the football team. We had to discover this for ourselves at McGill and now the Waterloo athletes as well. The collective of people in the administration from McGill, and now Waterloo, decided that something needed to be done and set some precedents. Obviously this decision deeply impacts the current Waterloo football community and its near future but I believe that in the long run it will have a greater impact on a national level for football and hopefully amateur sport.

This decision by the University of Waterloo will force the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport (CCES) to look deeper into how they can help prevent, monitor and control the substances that athletes are inducing in amateur sport. The athletes are ultimately responsible for their decisions to ingest banned substances but the governing body needs to assume some responsibility as well. When a community has lots of crime the police force is expected to control and clean up the mess and I believe the same could be said about doping in sports. If athletes can get away with doping then unfortunately some athletes will do so and until more rigid procedures are enforced doping will continue.

I believe that the current testing procedures are ineffective. I think that the “randomized” testing is well for lack of a better word, not random enough. I believe the term random in randomized testing, should also mean time of year; not just during the season, the testing should be sporadic. A university athlete trains and prepares him or herself year round and the drug tests should be put into effect during the off-season as well. It is obviously impossible to test all athletes several times a year due to the financial and logistical problems this poses but there are other plausible options and methods of performing these tests that could help control the doping dilemma.

I also think that invoking “targeted testing” would be a good idea, a procedure could be designed that would require teams to nominate a few players from opponents in their conference and have some of these players tested. Some players may find this shocking but if you have nothing to hide and are abiding by the rules then there should be no problems. I realize this allows opponents to control part of the testing process but I am only suggesting that this is done once a year to possibly help control some of the people that slip through the cracks of the randomized testing process.

In my five years at McGill University, I was never tested once. No big surprise here, I am like most university athletes, I was never tested during my entire amateur career. When I reflect and look back, maybe a couple teams in my conference may have wondered if I had taken any performance enhancers. I have never, and never will take anything of that kind but I was 191 pounds at my first McGill football training camp and by the time my fourth year training camp started I was 225 pounds. Not the biggest jump in the world but some teams may have been curious if my gains had been obtained through hard work or with the use of performance enhancers. I would not have been offended or had a problem with submitting to a test at any time to prove it.

Aside from the changes that I believe could help the testing process I also think that student-athletes need to take more responsibility. One thing that I probably didn’t understand well enough when I was in university was that just like I expect the school to support the athletics department and football team; it expects me to “support” the university. It expects me to represent the university to the best of my abilities.

When you are given the opportunity to play on a university team, you are representing yourself, your teammates, your coaches and all the alumni. This means that there are hundreds and thousands of people that your actions will reflect on. If you cheat, your actions not only affect you but all the people from your community. I hope that from this event some new effective procedures are put into place to allow athletes who are clean to continue to compete honestly and not have to suffer the consequences for other athlete’s poor, immoral decisions.

Let me know what you think.
www.erikgalas.blogspot.com

Spiel 6 Lubeck

Second post in a week! Alright I know its been a while since that has happened but trying to get back on track with my posting as well as getting some organizing done for my upcoming break here in July. I am going to try and travel around Spain, Portugal, France, Greece and maybe other places as well; we will see how much can be done in that short time.

As you may have read on the twitter updates we won our game against Lubeck. This game was our first game at home since the home opener 5 weeks ago, it was a nice change to not have to get on a bus and ride to our game. When I woke up in the morning and saw the rain I figured we would be playing in a wet game but an hour later or so the rain stopped and by the time of kickoff at 7pm, the field was dry and we were ready to go.

The lead-up to this game was a little interesting and unusual because of Ty’s injury he was unable to play and I was brought back to the defensive side of the ball to play safety. I was a little disappointed at first to have to switch back to defense because I am an offensive player and much rather enjoy beating the defender in front of me then having to stop offensive players. Surprisingly I really enjoyed my time on defense this week and also made a few tackles 3 solo and 1 assisted, unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of me making those tackles so you will just have to take my word for it.

All week I was taking repetitions on both sides of the ball hoping to be able to play offense as long as I wasn’t too tired to play defense. I didn’t know how realistic this goal would be since I am also on a few special teams so it was going to be a game time decision and talk about it on the sideline throughout the game to see how much offense I would be able to play. I knew if it was going to be as hot as the previous week it would be a lot harder but since it was an evening game and it rained earlier in the day I wasn’t as tired and was able to play most of the game both ways which was really exciting.

Here are a couple pictures from the game.





On offense I had a decent game, 4 catches for 87 yards and a touchdown. The stereotype associated with a lot of wide receivers is that of the showman and many like to celebrate a touchdown with a “dance”, but the people that know me from back in Montreal and university football know I don’t really do touchdown dances. Those that know me from high school well, they might think differently and say that I did like to celebrate when I got to the end zone or sometimes even on the way to the end zone.

I don’t really consider myself one of those receivers that do touchdown dances or celebrations but I will dabble in celebrations from time to time. During warm-up for this game, I was feeling very excited and was joking around singing/dancing as I was handing the ball to our offensive coordinator after each of my routes/catches I was joking around that if I scored a touchdown in the game I would do the electric slide in the end zone. Well, I caught a short pass and ran in for the touchdown but on the way I was staring at the field goal posts and instead of doing the electric slide; I dunked the football over the upright.



I have never been penalized for a celebration and didn’t want it to start against Lubeck, so instead of throwing it down really hard I made sure to get it over the upright and pick it up and hand it to the referee as quickly as possible. I think that generally referees will let some things go as long as it is done quickly, they don’t have to wait or chase for the ball and obviously isn't disrespectful to the other team (the respect aspect is open to discussion since some people believe any celebration is disrespectful and others don’t think celebrating is disrespectful, I am somewhere in between and think it is a situational dilemma).

Enough from me; let me know your favourite touchdown dance, if you agree or disagree with celebrations, are they part of the football? Why is it ok in other sports? Or any other comments.

Back On Track

After about two weeks off writing because my computer essentially crashed I have finally reloaded my operating system and can return to posting regularly.

In the past couple weeks, we have played two games and won both of them. The game against Bonn was a pretty easy game and we handled that one without any real difficulty. The second game and most recent was our final game against the Magdeburg Virgin Guards.

After the game against Bonn, I spent three days in Freiburg, Germany visiting my family there and getting the chance to visit the little village (Grafenhausen) that I spent two years living in when I was younger. I got the chance to visit the old farm that my family used to own and where my mom and her siblings grew up. The new owners have been restoring the property and in the short time that they have owned the property, the family living there has done an impressive job rebuilding/remodeling the property since it was basically unlivable when we sold it.

I also got the chance to go to France (which is just across the Rhein river near Grafenhausen) and eat a traditional food called Flammenkuchen. Flammenkuchen is similar to pizza, thinner dough and no tomato sauce; it can be prepared as dessert or main course, we had both. Just like pizza; flammenkuchen have many different types; we had some with onions and “speck”(smoked bacon), some with cheese and some with a combination of both. The dessert version is also quite tasty; it has “flambéed” apples with sugar on top of the dough. Here are a few pictures from that weekend.









In our first meeting versus Magdeburg, we beat them pretty soundly so we were hoping to do the same this time; the difference is that Magdeburg is 6 hours away and we needed to travel there the morning of the game. To the boys back at McGill, try to think the road trip back home from the East coast games on the bus but instead we stopped halfway and played a game, it was awful. We left at 6am from the Hockeypark and we stopped twice, once to pick up players that live on the way and the second time for a pregame walkthrough and a lunch prepared by Petra or as we imports call her “mom”.

When we arrived in Magdeburg it was about 30 degrees Celsius, you might think great, that is beautiful sunshine and wonderful conditions to play a football game but it was too hot. After a long bus ride, your legs are cramped and far from the best condition to be playing a football game, the sun only makes it worse by making it harder to stay hydrated and easier to cramp up. Many players and I were up on the field earlier/longer than usual to try and loosen our legs and get ready for the game.

We all did a good job getting ready since we took a commanding lead into half time. I obviously can’t speak for everyone but halftime was the worse thing possible for my legs. Sitting down and taking a break for a few minutes made the second half unbelievably hard for me to get my legs going again. I think the toll of the bus ride and the heat made the second half much harder for us as a team and we didn’t play as well and it became a game. Magdeburg came back and a couple of times were within striking distance; the game ended 37-29 Mavericks. It was a good character win for our team to remain undefeated as well as winning our fourth consecutive win on the road. Here are some pictures from our games against Bonn (baby blue) and Magdeburg (green/red).









As previously mentioned Magdeburg is 6 hours away from Monchengladbach, the bus ride took us from the Western border of Germany to the Eastern one. Berlin was only an hour and a half from Magdeburg so we decided as “Amis” that we would take a car with us to Magdeburg and then drive after the game to Berlin to spend a couple days there visiting the sights and enjoying the nightlife. We were supposed to be four players spending a few days in Berlin but Ty one of our Corners strained his MCL in the game and had to go back to ‘Gladbach to get evaluated by the doctors.

Since Ty had to go back to “Gladbach”, three of us decided to go and visit the sights. Berlin is a huge city with many things to see and do but we were only there for a day and half. We got the opportunity to see many of the big tourist sights such as Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall as well as the Brandenburger Gate but there were also many more that we didn’t get to see. Berlin has so many sights to see that we clearly didn’t have enough time to see everything but we accomplished a lot in our time there and enjoyed our time in Berlin. Below are some pictures from our time in Berlin.












Send me an email, post a comment or ask me question if I missed anything.