Go! ‘Necks! Go!

As a result of this weekends lacrosse action, the Calgary Roughnecks have clinched a playoff spot. Currently one of three teams tied for first place — the others being the Colorado Mammoth and the expansion Portland Lumberjax — with a record of 8–5, leaving the Arizona Sting and San Jose Stealth fighting for the final playoff spot.

A specific date has not been decided yet but the first playoff game will be held the weekend of April 21st. Season ticket holders can reserve their seats for whatever day the game may be. To reserve your seat download this PDF form (right click and choose “Save file”), fill it out and send it into the Roughneck office. In the event that the game is not held in Calgary, the purchase price of the playoff ticket will be credited towards next years season tickets.

While I’ve been deeply immersed in the online world and blogs I’m sure that most of you have not. Since that is the case I thought now would be a good time to explain one of the features of gonecksgo.com, namely “feeds”.

First of all, the term “feed” is becoming more and more prevalent and seems to be replacing the less user-friendly terms “RSS”, “XML”, and “Atom” in the blogging community. Feed simply refers to the syndication of that particular websites content. As an aside, RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication but merely seeing the acronym is quite confusing unless you know the meaning behind it.
(more…)

It’s been almost a week since McNish knocked out Edmonton Rush’s Stachniak during their last meeting and fans from both sides seem to have mixed thoughts about it. The split is pretty even amongst the people I’ve talked to. (more…)

Granted I’ve only been watching the Roughnecks for the last 3 years but this has to be the rockiest start I’ve seen in franchise history. I’ve been asking myself why this year? What is causing such a back and forth between wins and losses? Part of the answer seems to be the power-play.

Our boys can’t seem to capitalize as much as they used to when they have the man advantage. Take, for example, our last game against the Toronto Rock. At one point, during the third quarter, we had a two-man advantage. Rightly so the ‘Necks took their time setting up plays and working on their passing game but we failed to score the entire time we had the advantage. That amounted to approximately 3 minutes of the game.

This has been a running theme throughout the season so far. I have yet to see stats that say we were even close to 50% on our power-plays — I’d even venture to say that 20% is pushing it. Most of the stats I see put us at 0–X (X obviously being whatever number of power-plays we have for the game). If we could create more scoring opportunities and keep the pace and tempo up during the power-plays I’m sure the stats would change dramatically in our favour.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I have to say the new announcer isn’t too bad but he could use some work. Granted he’s probably still getting comfortable taking over for the last announcer – if anyone knows who that was I would love to find out Bruce Barker, currently announcing for the Toronto Rock – but that’s to be expected.

One thing I do have against the guy is his attempts at getting some chants going. Sure, he’s new but he should at least get the chants correct before starting them. I can also understand his need to be different, to set himself apart from previous announcers but seriously. Come. On. Here.

The chant is simple and it goes a little something like this, “Go! ‘Necks! Go!” It’s not “Go! Roughnecks! Go!” there’s just no rhythm in that. Our new announcer, we’ll call him Gary until I find out his real name, Beesley has also started an entirely new chant. It goes something like, “When I say ‘How do we like it?’ you say ‘Rough’ ready…” but I just can’t get into that one. Maybe I’m just being a stick in the mudd. What do you think?