Batley during training

The Chicago Shamrox will continue their training camp in Ontario this weekend. Wray Maracle, sports reporter for The Turtle Island News in Six Nations, ON, reports on the Shamrox opening session two weekends ago. At the Chicago Shamrox training camp last weekend, there were a number of familiar faces on their training camp rosters including 5-year NLL veteran Tom Montour, 2nd-year player and Cody Jacobs. The Shamrox are coming off their inaugural NLL season where they finished at 6-10, a respectable mark for a first year franchise. Of the players at the camp, Chicago Shamrox coach Jamie Batley was impressed with Bobby McBride. “Bobby McBride looks good”, Coach Batley said. “He’s a speed guy that plays for Brooklin (of the Ontario league in summer). Callum Crawford looked really good. We knew those guys were good players and we knew that they would probably shine and it’s good that they did.” For the most part Batley was not impressed with the conditioning of his team at this stage of the training camps.

“I don’t think we’re in shape”, Coach Batley noted. “That is not like us. I’m a little disappointed in the way that the fellows came into camp. We’re gonna have to learn that we don’t have the luxury of having guys that played for 7 or 8 years together and can score. We’re gonna have to learn very quickly that if we’re not the best shaped team in the league than we’re gonna be in trouble. That was our goal last year and I believe that we were. And that is why we were somewhat successful. Maybe we lost that somewhere, but we’ve got two weeks to get that figured out.”

Chicago will be looking to the veterans to provide leadership and scoring punch for much of the year. Jason Clark led the Shamrox with 58 points (17G, 41A), Chris Panos with a team-high 30 goals to go with his 19 assists and Mat Giles with 47 points (17G, 30A).

“Mat Giles is an 8 year veteran in the league”, Batley noted. “We’re gonna count on him an awful lot. Chris Panos, Lindsay Plunkett.. those guys are veterans that we’re gonna count on in offense. A few third year players like Andrew Lazore and Callum Crawford are going to add a new dimension to our offense because they weren’t here last year. They are gonna be good guys.. it’s just that we don’t have the luxury of having something like Toronto, who have been playing together for some time.”

Cody Jacobs finished with 22 points (14G, 8A) in only 11 games with the Shamrox in his rookie season. Jacobs was an outstanding goal-scorer for Six Nations Junior squads that he played on and will be expected to continue to light it up in the professional league.

“Cody (Jacobs) is in his second year.. he is a tremendous goal scorer”, Batley said. “We’re gonna look for him on the left hand side to score us a lot of goals this year. He’ll get some power play time as well.”

League veteran Tom Montour was acquired during the off-season and will be expected to add speed in the transition game for the Shamrox. “Tom Montour is gonna play great defense and then transition and we’ve added a couple of transition guys Brock Boyle who’s gonna transition for us and Bobby McBride who will also transition for us this year. So, we’re gonna have a speedy transition team.

“But the other guys have to be in shape too”, Coach Batley warned. “We’ve got to be well rounded in that area and I don’t think we are right now.” Expect Batley to put an emphasis on conditioning at the sessions this weekend.