From the Team Room, Vol. II: Building momentum and finding the beach

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Hello FC Buffalo fans! Connor Willings and I wanted to check in and give everyone an update on the team’s progress over the past couple weeks and shed some light on our overall experiences so far in Buffalo.

The team is coming off back-to-back wins and a real positive vibe is floating throughout the locker room. The definite disappointment of the Erie game has actually been a turning point of our season. We are currently sitting in the top half of the table in fifth and only one win off of second place. If we can keep the vibe we have going, we all know that our hopes for playoffs will be in our control.

Training sessions have consisted of plenty of 5v5 and 11v11 games to goal with finishing drills to end the session. Coach Murphy continuously stresses how we all need to do a better job to be more clinical in front of the goal considering we have yet to kill off a team despite the number of chances we get. Now thinking about it, we have somewhat addressed this issue by scoring five goals in our last two games. Although we might be scoring, we still have quite a bit to prove to ourselves and our fans, with our most important games of the season ahead of us.

Our next game is against AFC Cleveland and coming off our first clean sheet of the season, you can say we have a bit more confidence than before. Andrew Coughlin showed up for a big performance this past weekend with a couple key saves. We will definitely need him to secure a third straight win and put us in the driver seat for the playoffs moving forward.

Off the field, we managed to get our way around the city a bit and up to this point, we have definitely enjoyed our experience in Buffalo. We currently live in a four apartment complex at Hilbert College with a bunch of other guys on team (Eric Dahl, Kevin Kappock, Dylan MacVane, Peter DiLorenzo and Michael Clarke). Hilbert College and FC Buffalo really set us up nice as we also have access to the college’s weight room and training facilities. This is definitely the best perk of being here considering we usually go out and get a couple touches on the ball before actual training and can fulfill our individual workout out programs for school.

In our free time, which is a lot, we spend many of the hours in the day getting to know each other, playing games, working out or getting extra touches on the ball, some do homework or we just tour the City of Buffalo. Our most recent weeks activities have been filled with the NBA Finals that are now over and have been replaced with watching USWNT in the World Cup! With one Swedish kid living here, the USA and Sweden chants get pretty interesting.

Monday was one of our days off so we decided to venture off to a beach in Angola, N.Y. It’s crazy to think we just found out there was a beach literally 10 minutes but as the saying goes, “better late than never!” Although we should have been resting, it was nice to get out the apartment for a bit.

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