Two Weeks Left in America

This being my first post, please excuse the brevity of my explanations, hopefully I will get better at this as we go along. I just wanted to give everyone a little background on the team and town which I will be playing football for this spring.

A few months ago, I began my search to find a team in Europe for which I could play professional football. After months of searching, negotiating, decisions, and about the only time in my life I have genuinely been stressed out, the Cineplexx Blue Devils of Austria became the obvious choice. Signing this contract will give me the opportunity to continue playing the sport that I am passionate about, while also affording me the opportunity to see many new and exciting parts of the world. Perhaps even more exciting, is that my great friend and All-American wide receiver Michael Jennings will be coming with me. Last year at Illinois College, I played without him as he had graduated the year previous. However, we will get to re-connect both on and off the field, this time, in Austria.

Our team is located in Hohenems, Austria. While Hohenems itself is a small town of about 15,000 people, it is in a region of about 4-5 other towns of roughly the same population. It is one of the most centrally located places in Europe. It is just about as far west and north as one can go in Austria, sitting on the border with Switzerland, 12 miles south of the German border and the third largest lake in Central Europe, Lake Constance, which I read is a fairly large tourist destination for Europeans, but I suppose we'll find out about that when we get there. Hohenems is also 10 miles northeast of Liechtenstein (the richest country in the world by GDP per capita in 2008, by the way). Hohenems is also 50 miles north of Italy, and 100 miles west of France.

(above is a picture of Hohenems, Austria, and a neighboring town. Photo is from wikipedia.com, not from my own camera, unfortunately)

 The location of the town will afford me many opportunities to see parts of the world that I have only read about, or possibly seen on television, and this is extremely exciting to me.

    ("X" marks the spot on this map taken from http://mapsof.net/uploads/static-maps/thumbnails/central_europe_political_map_2000x0.png)

 I spoke yesterday with the owner of the team (Christoph), and I will be flying to Austria on January 18th, giving me just two weeks left here in the States. The season doesn't officially begin until March, but I wanted the opportunity to go over sooner, get my feet on the ground, and start meeting my new teammates. I am very excited to get to work preparing for the upcoming season and trying to help create a winner in the Cineplexx Blue Devils. Because of prior working engagements here at home, Mike won't be joining me in Austria until the end of February or beginning of March. This will give me 5-6 weeks in a foreign country by myself, getting to know the lay of the land. I am so overly excited that I fear these next two weeks will drag by.

We have the great opportunity as members of the Blue Devils to have four American coaches on our coaching staff. This is almost unheard of throughout Europe, and should help make our learning curve into the European game much easier. I feel very lucky to be going to a team with a large population of Americans. Each team in Europe is limited on the number of American players they can bring in each year, making the majority of the team mostly domestic players or players from other countries in Europe. I am new to this, and will be learning as I go along, and will update things as I learn them.

Thanks for joining me on my first adventure into blogging. I plan to make one more post before I officially move to Austria in two weeks. And hopefully it will be better than this one.

-Mitch Niekamp