6 Days...

Hi everyone. We are Stephen Phillips and Brett Axelrod. Long story, short, we're Whitman College soccer players, both class of 2009, and we're going to England over our 2 week Whitman spring break to train with some teams for two weeks. A pretty good introduction about us can be found on the website of the Whitman College Pioneer.

Our Whitman Coach, Mike Washington, and his friend Ray Evans set this whole thing up for us. It started as some training with Newcastle Town, then Crewe (1st division) was added, then the game and tour of the grounds at Stoke, then training with Stoke itself (Premier League). so, obviously, it has just been one exciting development after another for us. And there are only 6 days left until we leave...

Today is Monday. We're flying out of Seattle on Sunday morning. We'll be training with a new PDL team in Bremerton on Saturday night, a final tune up before we fly out on Sunday morning. Shoutout to Simon Quay for letting us stay with him on Saturday night as well as driving us to the airport for a 6:30 am flight. In case anyone is interested, we're out of Saattle at 6:30 and getting into New York-JFK at 3:00 PM (east coast time). A nice 6 hour layover and we're out of JFK at 8:45 (eastern time) and getting into Manchester at 8:00 am (UK time) on Monday morning.

The teams we'll be training with are Newcastle town FC, Crewe Alexandra FC, and Stoke City FC. We don't have much of a schedule yet, but we THINK our first week schedule will look something like this:

Monday - arrive
Tuesday - Train with Newcastle Town
Wednesday - Train with Stoke City
Thursday - Train with Newcastle Town
Friday - Train with Stoke City
Saturday - Attend Stoke vs. Middlesbrough and tour the grounds

After that, I'm not exactly sure, perhaps 3-4 training sessions with Crewe during the 2nd week and maybe we'll act like a couple of tourists also.

All for now, we'll update as Sunday gets closer, or after we're across the pond.

S&B