On June 20th the Warriors Dragon Boat team invited us down to Lake Miona Park to show us how they warm up, how they work together, and what twenty people moving as one looks like on the water.
This Tuesday we invited them to our pitch to return the favour.
They joined our warm-up. They went through what our players do at the start of every session, and then we brought the balls out, which is when it got interesting.
"These are egregious athletes, and it's so good, because they share their talents with us to make us better."
"On the Dragon Boat team, if you're not all together, you lose it. Same way with soccer. If you don't stick to the plan and you don't do what you're supposed to do, you're not going to win. So we really want them to be successful — and they helped us be successful."
There was a stretch of it where both teams held hands and played, which we can report made everybody worse at soccer and better at whatever the actual point was.
"When you held hands and started to play, it just makes you more of a team, because you're willing to play together. That's the same thing with dragon boat. If you're an individual and you don't fit into the team play, then we lose. Once you get a family type of thing, it's fantastic."
Then they gave our players something.
Every one of our squad received a challenge coin from the Warriors.
"We want to make sure we support you here, but we want to make sure that wherever you go, if we can't make it, that we're behind you 100%. So we're going to present something to you today that you'll be able to have forever. And we want you to look at it and make sure that you're not on the field alone. You're not on the practice field alone. You're far away from home, and we want to make sure that you feel at home here. We're part of your family, and you're part of ours."
Most of the players who got one of those coins arrived in Florida a few weeks ago from somewhere else entirely — different states, different countries, in a lot of cases their first summer away from home.
Thank you. All of you.
