As most of you know, I have been away on a Boomers camp to the Gold Coast, played in Italy and Turkey for three weeks and of course, been in pre-season training with the Crazy John’s South Dragons.

The 10-day camp at the Gold Coast was a great camp, I really felt like I stepped up a level and obviously I was selected to tour Europe.

This was my first tour with the main Boomers team. It was a fantastic experience and even though I didn’t get to play a lot, the little time I did spend on court was awesome.

Putting on the green and gold singlet and running around out there was a buzz I’ll never forget. But yes, two guys did have to get cut from the tour for the three-game series against New Zealand and yes, I was one of them.

Of course it’s disappointing not to make the team but it has put an even bigger fire inside me to improve and go to the Olympic trials a bigger and better player.

So I’ve been back with my Dragons teammates for a while now and it’s been great. I missed a bit with the tour but came in and all the boys looked great, we’ve been training extremely hard and all seem very fit!

To this point we have played four pre-season games; our first was against the new team in the league, Gold Coast Blaze. This was obviously a tough first hit-out and without our two imports it was a big challenge to see how we’d go without them. To the boys’ credit, we won, but we’re not getting ahead of ourselves as there are still things we need to improve.

On Monday night we got back from a six-day road trip to Perth. We treated this extremely seriously, training on the morning of the games, travelling a lot, playing games and scouting.

We ended up winning one of the three games and yes, there were some things on the trip that were great and some that were bad. But I guess the point of pre-season games is to see what we need to work on and get it all sorted out by the time the season starts.

Now back in Melbourne, we have games on Wednesday in Geelong and Thursday in Kilsyth, both against New Zealand, which we will use to again better ourselves and the team for the upcoming season.

I encourage as many fans to come out to these games as possible; it will be great to see what our fans are going to be like this year and you have a lot to live up to if it’s going to be like last year!

Again, sorry for the time between diaries, I have been really busy but I’m back into it now. I look forward to seeing you all out at our games this week... and don’t forget to ring the office on (03) 9690 6600 to get your memberships, because I know you all want to watch the Crazy John’s South Dragons play hard and entertain!

Jingles #7

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