As part of Cambridge United's commitment to developing players, Josh Coulson, Jordan Collins and Robbie Willmott are spending the month of June in Seattle.

As reported here at the start of the month, the lads are keeping to an off-season training schedule of weights and running and they are training with Seattle Sounders, where United major shareholders and directors Paul Barry and Adrian Hanauer are also involved.

But the main focus of their visit is a development program of innovative methods of cognitive processing development and skill building for athletic mental power performance.

Here is the next of our updates direct from the lads themselves, from Josh (Dino) Coulson, helped a little bit by Jordan (Casper) Collins.

The second week has moved up a gear or two in the cognitive training, which has been harder and more interesting. We have been finding out a lot of things about ourselves that we didn't really know.

We had a friendly game against Juventus Primavera (their U23 team) on Thursday for the Sounders. We were told by Paul (Barry) that we may get on the bench, turned up for the game and the Manager, Brian Schmetzer, sat everyone down and named the team. When he said that I was going to be starting I didn't really know what to think other than "How am I going to get through this without an oxygen tank?!"

Juventus had a young team but were decent when they got the ball down. It took me a while to get used to the style of play over here, but once I got into it I was OK. It's a bit slower over here and you get more time on the ball. Jordan Collins (aka Casper) came on for 35 minutes and did well, and then Robbie Willmott (aka The Sleepy Mexican) came on soon after, and he also did well. I would like to think that all three performances gave a good impression of our club and ourselves as people.

Away from all the training we have been doing, we still spend most of the time getting lost! Robbie's map reading skills aren't the best so it takes a long time to get home.

Other than getting lost, we went round to Paul Barry's house for a BBQ on Friday. We ended up going for a dip in the lake, which is freezing (but which doesn't seem to affect his son Liam), but luckily enough we just jumped straight in the hot tub.

We also got the kayaks out and had a nice float around the massive lake. We have also spent a lot of time in both the gym and the games room playing table tennis and pool, and we have been sleeping a lot as we recover from our continuous cognitive training and the work in the gym.

We have been taken care of by several people over here. Paul's girlfriend Christina has let me use her car, our apartment complex has two managers, Monica and Adrienne, who treat us like their brothers, The Sounders allow us to train any day we wish, and Hal and Jane, our cognitive trainers, schedule around our various other events.

We're all looking forward to July 4th, which is the start of pre-season.

Josh Coulson

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