Touchdowns in the heart of Europe: American football thrives in Prague
If you’ve heard the roars of a crowd at Prague’s Viktoria Zizkov stadium, there’s a chance it’s been fans of the Prague Lions, the American football team who recently qualified for the European League of Football (ELF) this season. This past week, I sat down with head coach Zach Harrod and quarterback Shazzon Mumphrey to talk about what the process of stepping up into the ELF has meant for the team and for the sport here in Czechia.
Zach, you talk a lot about how much of a privilege it has been for you to grow American football over the past 20 years here in Czechia, tell me about that journey of developing the sport here.
“I think it’s important to give credit where credit’s due. In many ways, I’m standing on the shoulders of people who started growing the sport before me.
“The Lions started in 1991 when I was 11, and I came over ten years after that. But over the last 20 years it’s been an up and down, a rollercoaster in many ways.
“I came here in my mid 20’s wanting to coach and make a difference in lives through the sport, and realized that the game had far more potential.
“Czechs are natural athletes, and we’ve got big guys here, everything started to come into view to me that there could be more to the game.
“I started to focus on bringing people over to train the guys. I brought people from Division One to do camps, we’ve brought the team over to the United States to do clinics coached by Division One college coaches and NFL coaches, and so really doing everything I could to grow the game through the Prague Lions.
“But my eyes have always been on the bigger picture to push the game to the next level, and not just with our team.
“After we made the announcement about joining the European League of Football (ELF) I was taking my kids to school, and a couple of the dads came up to me and said ‘so this is a real thing?’, and I looked at them thinking ‘I’ve been here for 20 years, and what I’ve done isn’t a real thing?’, and it was a bit of a slap in the face at first, but then I started thinking to myself that this is really different.
“Maybe one of my kid’s classmates is going to be the first Czech to get a Division One scholarship, or make an NFL roster, or snap a ball in an NFL game.
“The thought of that happening, and that being a six year old watching us play in the ELF on Sundays, those are the moments I need to cling to.”
I want to talk about the societal perceptions here in Czechia around American football. It’s definitely not as popular of a sport as it is in the United States or Canada, but how have you seen the societal attitudes around the game shift?
“The Czech Football Association has done a great job on the media side of things to grow the sport and get it in front of more people.
“One of the biggest needs is capital, more hype and push behind the sport, and it’s hard to find that. But the ELF provides that in many ways, last year it had half a billion households in its global reach.
“With new added markets in Central Bohemia, Paris, and Milan, it ups the level of the reach and attracts more people. The more eyes on it is not just going to help the Prague Lions, it’s going to help the game in general.
“If a kid can turn on the TV and see the highest football in Europe being played, the more young Czech kids will see the sport get normalized and want to play the game.
“When this starts happening, we can start attracting athletes earlier on to our sports across the country, and the whole level is going to increase.”
Shazzon, it’s your third season with the Prague Lions, how have you experienced the development of stepping into the ELF, and what are the steps that you’ve seen be really instrumental for taking the team to the next level?
“I’ve seen everything from the player standpoint and behind the scenes, there is so much work that has been put into this.
“From a player standpoint, it’s been the level of training and so much more effort being put in even in the off season.
“It seems like a lot more guys are focused and really want to make something out of this, and it feels a lot more serious from when we were playing in the Czech league the past few years.”
Have you felt the energy and motivation of the team shift with the step in the ELF?
“Absolutely. Even our homegrown talent are taking it to a different level. We’ve brought in 10 foreign players, and then a bunch of other Czech players who have been playing abroad.
“But it’s just the energy that everyone new brings, it’s contagious to the guys we’ve already had on our team. Everyone is stepping it up mentally and physically, and it’s pretty professional.”
Zach, there are currently ten foreign players on the team, what do you think that international recruitment says about the level and quality of football in Czechia right now?
“One of the things we always talk about is not being afraid of competition, it just breeds more for us, so let’s not fear competition, let’s get better as a result.
“Everyone has to do more and work harder now, and that is one of the biggest challenges of this shift.
“It used to be that there were four guys that were clear starters and other guys that fill in, but now everyone has to be in a position where they can be a starter, you have be that good.
“It’s an adjustment, because there were guys who had more time playing in the Czech league than they do now, but it’s just motivation for them to get better.
“I’ll repeat it again, we need to embrace competition, and if we can do that, we’re only going to get better.”
Shazzon, how have you stayed composed during the first two games and kept the team calm and lead with a sense of direction as you’ve made this step?
“It’s easy when you’ve got a bunch of guys like I do around me to help out.
“Some of the guys we’ve brought in to play offensive line are natural leaders themselves and really good football players. They also go along well with the players we already have, so this makes my job a lot easier.
“Given that I’ve been with the team for two seasons already, we played pretty well and had some success in the Czech league, I’ve got pretty good chemistry with everyone.
“The team makes my job easy, it’s not hard to lead these guys.”
Shazzon, does the team chemistry come from the time you guys spend together? What’s the comradery like off the field?
“A lot of these guys are some of my best friends in the world.
“Since I’ve been here for two years in a row and this is going to be my third, of course we spend time together training and lifting weights, but we also spend a lot of time together outside of football.
“We have really good, genuine people on the team that I haven’t experienced in other places. I have really good friendships with them, and a lot of them I consider my brothers.
“We’ve been through everything good and bad together. In the Czech league we lost the championship together, and the next year we came back and won it together.
“The whole rollercoaster with these guys by my side and me by theirs just makes the bond even stronger and bigger.”
You guys are playing the former ELF champions this coming Saturday, the Vienna Vikings. Coming off of two losses, as a coach, Zach, how are you feeling about the upcoming game and how are you preparing the team?
“In the past two games, we were in positions to win both games, and I think we’ve shown that we belong in this league.
“It comes down to cleaning up mental errors and executing. So if we had cleaned up those errors and executed a bit better, it would have been two different stories for our first two games.
“So the biggest thing is controlling the controllable, and I say to the guys all the time ‘we can control two things, our attitude and our effort’, so I think if we do well with both those things and we have a good week, we can surprise somebody.
“That’s the unique thing about this league, of course there’s the favourites, but really anything can happen week to week. It says a lot about the league in general and why there is so much excitement.
“This past weekend at a Hamburg game they broke an attendance record, they had 32,000 people at a regular season game. So we’ve got to take it step by step, and there’s no bad days, only bad moments.
“If we control our attitude and our effort, we can always flip a bad moment and have a good day from it.”
Shazzon, what are you taking from the past two losses as quarterback and bringing into the game this Saturday?
“Honestly, we have to get out of our own way.
“We’ve competed from first to last whistle in our first two games, and just as we’re down two losses right now, we could easily have been up by two wins.
“We’re going to watch the film from our past game and learn from it, but the focus is going to be on Vienna. It’s not so much that they’re the reigning champs from last year, they’re just another opponent in this league.
“Sure they were the best team in Europe last year, but now they’re on our schedule and they’re right in front of us.
“Because the level is so high and everyone has good players and coaches, anything can happen.”
