Mark's Blog - March 2013
What's up everybody?! Right now it's the 1st of March and this is blog post numero uno from me, Sheffield Steelers guard Mark Scholefield! Gonna be keeping you guys updated on my training and competitions, aswell as what goes on in my life and the side to national and international that maybe not everybody sees. Glad to have you along for the ride and I hope you enjoy my blog.
At the time of writing this, it's less than 5 days before I'll be touched down in Germany and getting ready for the preliminary round of the 2013 Eurocup, where we'll be playing club teams from Germany, France, Turkey and Holland in what is going to be a very tough competition. We've got high hopes for the tournament and we're hoping to qualify for either the André Vergauwen Cup (held in Giulianova, Italy) or the Willi Brinkmann Cup (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria).
I played for the Steelers team that won gold at the Challenge Cup last year and it was one of the best experiences of my life, although the team is very different this year compared to last, there's no reason we can't at least match our 2012 success.
The 11 players and 4 or 5 staff will be in Germany from Wednesday-Sunday, playing two games on each day on Friday and Saturday. Almost feels pointless putting this into a blog seeing as I don't have words to describe how much I'm looking forward to the 4 games! (If anyone has any good words for extreme excitement, drop me a comment and I'll try work them into my next post).
Although the games are the reason we go out to these tournaments and without a shadow of a doubt my favourite thing about basketball, there are a lot of other things that make these trips abroard what they are, and it changes wherever you go.
You see and do things while travelling that would just never happen in your daily routine, over the past couple of years, here are some of the common and not-so-common places that I've found myself just passing time in:
Driver seat of my car while my travelling buddy snoozes away
Airport queues
Airport cafes and restaurants
In an ambu-lift waiting to board the plane, with a barely-alive Joe Williams
Looking out of minibus windows in the new country
So many hotel rooms, all with little, if any, English TV
In the bits of sports facilities that you never usually see - store rooms, outside little back entrances
A tiny Canadian pizzeria at 9am
A single shop in an Italian shopping centre that sells everything from car tyres to fresh fish and vegetables, to TVs and any other electronics
There are so many more, but that list probably gives you an idea of how much time that you end up spending just hanging around when you're travelling. It's all part of the lifestyle though and you learn to love it! Its always fun to be in new places and discovering new things with your friends, so it hardly ever gets boring. The other way you learn to get around the waiting is to build up a list of items that you always have with you in your basketball bag:
Tablet - keep a fairly fresh mix of movies and games
Headphones & Speaker
At least 1 magazine or book
Laptop - especially important for me as I need to use as much free time as possible to get school assignments done
Couple of DVD's
Music - keep a good selection of new stuff and a few favourites to get you ready at gametime.
We have one last day of training this Sunday before flying on Wednesday, our last chance to get ourselves performing at our best and ready to take on whoever we meet out there!
Hope you guys have enjoyed my first blog, I'll update again after I get back from Germany. If you've got any questions, leave me a comment or tweet me (@marcuthh) and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!
Peace
Mark
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