Good morning to everyone in the States and especially, my family! I miss everyone very much already. Well we had our first training session this morning on an awfully small synthetic field that we had to share with the Open womens team. Needless to say, it was not conducive for a great session, not to mention the surface was horrible. It was all infill rubber pellets and very little synthetic grass. Kind of reminded me of the "hardplatz" fields in Germany, except worse! From now on we will be training on grass at a very nice field and alone! The balls and training bibs Maccabi shipped were lost in transit and only 11 balls made it, but no bibs. Somehow the Israeli person helping facilitate all our training was able to get us enough balls, so every team had at least 8 to use. He is extremely nice and most helpful to us. So, our first training went well, I thought. The players worked very hard and I think we will be pretty good, as long as we can come together as one team and leave all our egos on the side and put the team first. I know they will do that, as they all have that common goal of winning! We mainly played 6 v 6 after some warm-up drills and working on "vertical play" out of the back. This afternoon, we will continue our vertical style of possession play and play on a small field to simulate the pressure we want to execute in all our games. Then we will open the field up for 10 v 10, trying to find the right mix of players to run our system of play. With only 6 subs per game snd no re-entry once you are out, it is going to put a premium of developing ths mix quickly. I will write again this evening after our training and dinner. So until then, take good care and be well! From Israel, Coach G