Mon 5 Sep 2022 - 7:15PM

MESSAGE FROM PANTHERS CEO OMAR PACHA

Hi Panthers Nation,

I hope everyone has had a great summer!

After five pre-season games, we now start the business part of the regular season this coming Saturday (19:00 face-off) at home vs Guildford Flames. It has been a gruelling, yet exciting, summer in every manner, shape and form for all of us here at the Nottingham Panthers. From adding different personnel on and off the ice on the hockey side of the business to making other adjustments in our front office - all moves made to aid the progression of our Club.

It is important that as a Club we keep improving daily so that we meet our goals this upcoming season. All these marginal, step-by-step gains are progressively showing, and I couldn’t be more excited for the short, medium and long-term future of this great Club.

One of our main early goals was to ensure that we made all the players as comfortable as possible from the second they landed here in the UK. I am proud of all the staff involved - they went the extra mile throughout a very full-on time in getting all the players settled quickly.

The small things matter massively, and it has been great to receive such positive feedback from fans on various things related to the Club over the past few months – believe me, this is a process, it will take time to get to exactly where I want us to be, but we will get there.

We have also seen some minor tweaks to our game-night so far and we will keep improving this – a full and engaging fan experience is very important to me and I will keep pushing to ensure it happens.

Looking back on the pre-season games, we were very realistic that we were basically getting a brand-new team and starting from scratch. As a former coach, the most important aspect about training camp is conditioning, learning how to play together, trialling different combinations to find chemistry with certain players, and putting different systems in place for the actual regular season.

With a big turnover in playing staff, it will take time for the players to gel together, but I know Coach Graham has certainly put the guys to work in these past two weeks and I also know from our chats that he has learnt a lot already about our team in that time.

Even though it’s always nice to win in pre-season, it is way more important that Gary got to see his players in different situations to give him that much-needed barometer on everything. We have faced a bit of early adversity with a few niggles but overall, with another week of training and with the league campaign starting, the boys will take another big step forward.

Looking ahead to this Saturday night and our opening home game of the 22/23 season – I know how excited everyone is internally to start the competitive fixtures, as I’m sure you all are too. It’s so important that we all do this together, through the good times and the tough – the fans are the Club – so I really hope we have a bumper crowd on Saturday night to help push the guys on the ice to start the season as positively as possible. We will be ready!

See you then Panthers Nation.

Omar

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