USA FOOTBALL TOUR MAX KILBURN, LEWIS LANT & ANDREW SCOTT

USA FOOTBALL TOUR

COMPILED BY MAX KILBURN (L6), LEWIS LANT (U6) & ANDREW SCOTT (U6)

An unearthly early hour of departure from Newcastle Airport was the preparation for a transatlantic flight to JFK in New York.

With 28 students in tow, all looking the part in their tour shirts kindly sponsored by Squires Barnett Architects, the USA Football Tour was finally underway.

Our first few days were spent in The Big Apple doing the touristy bits from our hotel base overlooking Central Park. An open top bus tour of Manhattan, a boat tour around the island of Manhattan taking in the Statue of Liberty, visiting Washington Square and Greenwich Village, walking over Brooklyn Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan at sunset, seeing the 9/11 Memorial, and viewing the city at night from the Top of the Rock were amongst the highlights of the New York experience. Many thanks to Wuliang and Peter Walker (52-60) for hostingan evening of drinks and eats in their apartment looking down 5th Avenue. It was great to catch up with them there, along with two ONs, Adam Cogan (98-08), James Prince (99-06) and their wives.

Next, pick up three, 12-seater vans and drive them out of New York on a Saturday and head north for many hours to New Hampshire when the football started. Piece of cake! Almost as easy as playing football in lots of heat and high humidity.

Having seen all New York had to offer, we set off on the short six hour journey to Manchester, where the football would finally begin. The First Team kicked off the tour against GPS whilst the Second Team got underway against Bedford HS. These games proved to be two tough tests, with the biggest test, adapting to the scorching temperatures. It wasn’t long before we had our first win of the tour with the Second Team coming out on top against Oyster River JV. However, it wasn’t until we arrived in Cape Cod before the First Team finally got off the mark, despite some excellent performances, in a very competitive encounter against Barnstable. The win provided the team a platform to build on at the Bourne HS Jamboree, where both sides came away with two well deserved victories apiece. The highlight of the tour came the following day against state champions Naucet, despite falling to a 2-1 defeat the First Team competed from the first minute to the last. They narrowly missed out on clinching a deserved draw when they hit the post in the last minute from a long throw in. As we began to near the end of the tour, tiredness began to creep into the squad, which was evident in the following game against Winchester, who were arguably the toughest test of the tour for both sides. We concluded our time in the US with four fixtures at the Groton High Jamboree, in which the whole squad was involved despite many suffering from exhaustion and fatigue from the prior 16 games played throughout the trip.

Being hosted by the American families was very much a memorable event for all the squad. From group barbecues to paintballing to bridge-jumping, our generous hosts offered us a variety of activities to give our team the best possible experience of the US, something which we are all very grateful for. Whilst in America, the RGS was kindly treated to three ‘cookouts’ by Monomoy, Amesbury and Groton – all of which delivered up to the high standards our coaches had set for them from the previous trips. The Groton cookout came at the end of our tour – at the finale of the jamboree. A great experience with four other separate schools joining us for our ultimate feast into American culture, accompanied by our last hosts and opposition players, who did everything to make our time in Groton a memorable one.

Many thanks to Wuliang and Peter Walker and to Mark Squires (73-83)and Squires Barnett Architects for their sponsorship. For more details on sponsorship opportunities, please contact development@rgs.

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