New Season

Time for a new season. This year I am playing for Khimik basketball club in Ukraine. We will be playing in the Ukrainian Superleague as well as Eurocup competition. Eurocup competition means we will be traveling all over Europe playing against some of the top teams over here. The groups for Eurocup have not been released yet so we don’t know exactly who we will play in the first round or where we will travel. They are supposed to be released in October I believe. I’m looking forward to being able to play twice a week this year and see more of Europe at the same time.
I’ve enjoyed my new team and coaches so far. We had 2 and a half weeks of training camp in Liepaja, Latvia where we did outdoor running as well as practice and weight sessions. The city is on the coast of the Baltic Sea. We also played two friendly games against local teams in which we won.
After that we traveled to Ukraine to our hometown in Yuzhne. Here we had a week of practices and preparation. Yuzhne is a very small town of about 25,000 people on the coast of the Black Sea. We are about 40 minutes away from Odessa which is a very large tourist city around 1.3 million people.
This past Friday we traveled to Kaunas, Lithuania for 2 weeks of games and practices. The city seems very nice and has strong history from World War 2 with one of the largest concentration camps. Will be interesting to walk around on our days off. The mall is large and modern with English movies! Looking forward to hopefully catching a couple while we are here.
We had our first game here last night against a Russian team in which we won by 12. Our team is coming together but still have a lot of work to do. We play next tomorrow night against a strong Lithuania team.

Erin hopefully gets here around September 20 or so. Looking forward to having her here and exploring our new home together. Miss her. We are going to try to combine blogs this year so we will alternate and hopefully do a better job of staying on top of it this season.
Hope all is well back in the states.

The photos below are from liepaja, our beach in Yuzhne and our gym. Our gym is very modern looking on the outside and I’m told its the best floor in all of Ukraine.

Matt