Nick Merklin '08 (left) and two fellow Americans playing football in Serbia
Former Pioneer player and coach Nick Merklin '08 is playing professional football in Serbia. Playing WR, DB, and KR for the Kragujevac Wild Boars, Nick is blogging about his experiences at Football in Serbia.
The following is an excerpt from one of his posts:
We journeyed up north on Thursday afternoon, around 3 PM, through Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic towards our destination – Wroclaw, Poland. This out-of-country game was the second of three round robin games in our pool of the EFAF Challenge Cup. Our opponents were the Wroclaw Devils, a semi-final team from the Polish league last year. Restrictions on Serbs leaving the country are excessively high. Stan and I first noticed this on our trip to Budapest, as our train was stopped for nearly 2 hours and our passports were checked about 10 times (in reality they were probably checked just twice each, but I felt the need to exaggerate here). The check this time wasn’t as bad, but we did take the opportunity to scare a couple of our guys by making them line-up outside the bus, saying that Border Patrol needed to re-check them. Got to keep the guys on their toes. We got to Wroclaw at 11 AM Friday morning and checked into the Boogie Hostel. Then we gallivanted around the city.
