Whitecaps player blog: Jake takes Hawaii, rookie can't find his pineapple

Image: Vancouver Whitecaps FC

With the Vancouver Whitecaps in Hawaii preparing for the start of the MLS season that begins next month, Daily Hive has tasked second-year MLS defender Jake Nerwinski with keeping us up to date. Here’s his first blog entry from Honolulu.

Aloha!

Hey everyone, it’s Jake Nerwinski here from the Vancouver Whitecaps. I’m looking forward to sharing some of my experiences out here in Hawaii with you over the next week.

Let’s get right into it.

We flew into Honolulu on Wednesday night. As you may have seen online, a few of the guys pulled off a prank on Justin Fiddes, who we just picked up in the SuperDraft, at the airport. They told him he needed a pineapple stamp to fly to Hawaii and got the Air Canada agent to play along. LOL.

Did you know, as of 2018, Hawai’i requires a pineapple stamp for travel?

Neither did Justin Fiddes 😉😂 #VWFC pic.twitter.com/RPz9vSmOTp

— Vancouver Whitecaps (@WhitecapsFC) February 1, 2018

I’ll admit, I felt kind of bad for him. I didn’t go through any of that last year when I was a rookie. But everybody played it off pretty cool, so that was a good start to the trip!

Thursday was our first full day in Hawaii.

It started off with a recovery session on the beach after a long day of training/travel on Wednesday. That was a lot of fun. Well, maybe not for Aly Ghazal, who got thrown into the water by the whole team, but it was his birthday so we had to do something!

When it’s your birthday in Hawaii 💦@AlyGhazal // #VWFC pic.twitter.com/3xa7PPB0d9

— Vancouver Whitecaps (@WhitecapsFC) February 2, 2018

And then we got the rest of the day to ourselves.

I ended up going surfing with Stefan Marinovic, Nicolas Mezquida, and our head of video analysis Andy Peat. Andy was probably the best. He showed us all up, for sure. I’m just happy I caught a few waves and got up more than Stef, because we had a competition going on. He was definitely the worst (I’m allowed to say that because he’s my roommate and one of my good friends on the team).

All in all, everyone is really happy to be here and it was nice to have a lighter day to start things off. But we all know the main purpose of us being here is to get ready for the season. We can’t enjoy the weather and everything else Hawaii has to offer too much. We’re really excited to get a few games going to see where we’re at and to start really gelling as a team.

That’s all for now. Please let me know if you have any questions for my next blog.

Talk soon!

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