Wednesday May 15, 2002 on Toronto Lynx Media Day on a practice field outside Centennial Stadium in Etobicoke I joined the other journalists present for interviews and I spoke to Lynx leading scorer Niki Budalic (NB) while I'm (RR) Rocket Robin:

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RR-- I used to watch you last year, you played for Glen Shields for awhile. I guess I caught you in two games. Did you start and finish the year with them or go off to college or what?

NB--Sort of. What happened is I got drafted to come play here, for the Lynx but I was coming off knee surgery so I came back and I wasn't quite ready to play and I trained here for about two months and then I decided I needed some game action. I wanted to start out at a bit lower level and so I went to Glen Shields and I played there for about ten games or so, something like like that approximatedly and I went back to school in August.

RR-- Which was, I forgot, where was it?

NB--Laurier, Wilfred Laurier.

RR--Yeah right! so you guys played out there in that windy game, I was out there in Kitchener. And you were on the Lynx so you had mixed feelings about that?

NB--Oh that? Well I played a half on both teams so it was like a win-win situation.

RR--Yeah I missed the first half.

NB--Yeah I played with Laurier the first half and played with the Lynx the second half.

RR--I don't know if you'd ever learn much on that, artificial turf and how the wind just blew the balls. Cornerkicks were about impossible.

NB--Yeah it was crazy, yeah difficult.

RR-- Ok. Now you've seen the calibre of play, like I don't know if you scored any goals with Glen Shields last year but you come here and you've got four goals already!

NB-- Well I played midfield at Glen Shields so it was a little bit different but I did manage to score...maybe four or five goals when I was there but here I play up front so you get more opportunities.

RR--Ok great! So any great ideas that you're going to play against this 1860 [Munich] team? Any strategy for that or just see how it goes?

NB-- (Laughs) I think we're just going out to play. I think they're such a great team it's going to be difficult to prepare specifically for them but I think we're going to go out there and play them head on and see how we fair.

RR-- Yeah, nothing to lose. Well thanks for talking to me.

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I haven't done any interviews before on my microrecorder. These questions were a bit different than the ones the other reporters asked. I always thought this web site would be a great place for those kind of interviews but the transcription of these tapes would (and did) take a long time. What you read here took place in only two minutes and six seconds. If I want to keep up my game reports once the season starts, I don't think I'll have the time for any interviews.

Rocket Robin
robing@eol.ca

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