Rampage Begin Practice for 2004
Randy Snow
Friday January 23, 2004
“I was supposed to be here at 6:30 this morning,” said Cortese. “But I got here at 5:00! I couldn’t sleep last night, wondering what I was going to say. I wanted to make sure we were organized enough, you know, all the fun things that go into coaching.”
Cortese has four years experience coaching in the Arena Football League, but he has not coached at this level since 2001 when he was with the Oklahoma Wranglers. Since then he spent the better part of two seasons with the Wichita Stealth of the af2 and is excited about being back in the “big league.”
The first day of practice was also Cortese’s first look at the 36 players currently under contract with the team, and time is already growing short for some players. The team has a scrimmage scheduled for January 26th in Detroit against the Indiana Firebirds, and then Cortese will have to trim the roster down to the regular season limit of 24 players by February 1st. The first regular season game is on February 8th in Chicago against the Rush. That game is scheduled to be televised on NBC.
Cortese was hired after Michael Trigg resigned as Rampage head coach on August 6th following six seasons in Grand Rapids. Trigg is now the head coach of the Philadelphia Soul expansion team.
Realignment Rekindles Rivalry
With three new expansion teams added this season, it was inevitable that some realignment was going to take place. Fortunately, the league saw fit to put Detroit and Grand Rapids back in the same division once again, as they should be.
When the Detroit Fury entered the league in 2001 it was only natural that an intrastate rivalry with the more established Grand Rapids team would develop. It certainly did. The two teams played each other twice in 2001 and 2002, and it was evident that they didn’t like each other right from the start. Then last year, Detroit was moved out of the Central Division and placed in the East. The two teams did not play each other in the regular season at all, but Grand Rapids hosted the Fury in the first round of the playoffs. The result was a 55-54 last second win by the Fury that Grand Rapids fans will not soon forget.
The cross state rivalry heats up once again on April 10th when the Rampage travel to the Palace of Auburn Hills to take on the Fury. The Rampage will return the favor and host Detroit in the regular season finally on May 29th.
Randy Snow covered the Grand Rapids Rampage of the Arena Football League for ArenaFan from 2003-2008. He also covered the Fort Wayne Fusion of arenafootball2 in 2007. From 2004-2008 and in 2010, he was a member of the Arena Football League Writer’s Association and, since 2011, has been a member of the Professional Football Researchers Association. Randy lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan but will travel just about anywhere for a football game or a great football story. He runs the web site www.theworldoffootball.com and hosts a podcast with his son, Adam, called “This Week in The World of Football.”
