KRETZSCHMAR | "It's such a good environment to play in"
With many of last season's squad retained, Max Kretzschmar was the final one to sign the dotted line and commit for a brand new season, taking the number of last season's squad still with us up to 15.
We spoke to him on the first day back at pre-season training to get an idea of how he feels going into the new season. This was the players first time training together again since the end of last season in April.
"It's [the break] quite long, we've had two months but we normally only get four or five weeks so it's been nice but it comes back around quickly and we're back into it now so I'm looking forward to it."
Max faced injury spells last year, his first at the club, with hamstring issues and has been working alongside strength and conditioning coach, Rachel Hill, to work on strengthening that back up. He's looking forward to gaining more game time this season to assist his team.
"Rachel gave me some stuff to do and I've been strengthening that back up. When I was fit last season I thought we won a lot of games and we had a better points to game ratio when I was playing. I'm confident that I can play more games and have a really good season."
When Max was involved in games last season, he found success from the penalty spot as well as finding himself six goals and a series of assists.
"Yeah I've always liked taking penalties and I had quite a lot of assists last season for the amount of minutes I played. I think we need to be a bit nastier and a bit more streetwise and put the ball in the back of the net because a lot of the games we played, we created a lot of chances but didn't score."
Kretzschmar was asked whether he had any second thoughts on continuing with the club coming into a new season. He explains that he's looking forward to what is to come this season.
"Not at all. It's such a good environment to play in. It suits my style of play and I hope we can push on this season and who knows - there's a bit of a void in the league with the two big clubs going up last season so I don't want to put too much pressure on us but we're really excited about what we're going to do."
Wealdstone saw a majority of players progress from last season into this coming season. Max explains that the player retention is a benefit for the teams training as it allows them to skip a few steps as they already know each other's styles.
"It's really rare as well in non-league, you'd be lucky to keep seven or eight players from one season to another so to have 15 or 16 is going to be massive. We know how each other play so we don't have to go through that and adapt to that. We may not have to work on that as much and do some more individual work and put right what went wrong last season."
Words by Libby McElhinney