It was only made formal about a week and a bit ago, but I'm one of the coaches at the 2011 Junior Australian titles for the Vic team.  I'm again a junior/assistant and will be a general dogsbody for the sprinters.  Dino Apolito and Hilton and I drove up today, I drove the CSV van loaded with bikes, Hilts' ice bath and frame etc (the CSV van is henceforth known as The Van that Rocked, my mp3 player kept us going and the van has good speakers!) with Dino to keep me from falling asleep, Hilts drove his VW Transporter with some 16 or so bikes in it.  I think it took us about 9 hours to get here.  Dino's very kindly thrown some frequent flyer points at me for accomodation (things got a bit confused with regards to where I was staying for a while) for which I owe him a debt of gratitude!

Anyway, we're here and I don't have to sleep in the van and the local pub serves suprisingly good steaks (given that it's a pokie barn in the BadLands of Sydney, I was amazed .. but there you go ..).  The team arrives tomorrow around midday and we have the same gear storage that we had for the senior titles a month and a bit ago, which is a big gear room at the velodrome.  There's 21 riders and bikes and four coaches to look after them so we have heaps of coaching resources and excellent team management, so I expect things will go smoothly.  Everyone's done this before (although for me, only once and it was a very steep learning curve) lots of times so we're unlikely to run into anything we haven't experience to cope with.

Hopefully I'll get to spend some more time with Sean Eadie and Clay Worthington and will get a little more done on The Book.  They're (Sean and Clay and Shorty, from the AIS) are doing a talk on sprint coaching later this week which I'm looking forward to as well.  This is going to be a great week!