New groups mean new rivalries, and as far as the Silverhawks are concerned, the Dukes will be their biggest competition. It was a strange season for the Hawks last year, because on the surface, not much changed as they finished with just three wins. Realistically though, they did improve, but it just didn’t translate to wins.

“I think that we lacked maybe a really good offensive player, a playmaker that would lead the way for the whole offense … From a broader perspective, we lacked experience. If we compare the offense and the defense, the veterans on defense played well, but on offense, there were many new players”, says the Hawks coach Uroš Valant.

Other than new rivalries, new groups in the case of the Silverhawks, mean new opportunities. Instead of the group with the Blue Devils, they are in a group that probably all can agree is the weaker of the two, and for some period of time, it looked as if they would have a chance of being a bigger factor in 2009.

“We put in a lot of hard work into organizing, practices and motivation. And when you see you’re still losing games, sometimes you’d rather leave it all. But each year we come back and set new goals. With the current generation of players, ‘things will get better’ is somehow not good enough anymore.

The Novi Sad Dukes are strong again and since they gave us a lesson each year, of course deserve all our respect. For us, they represent a level we have to attain.”

One of the current problems Valant says are the injuries. Though the Silverhawks are struggling with that, the Dukes are those that had a more significant problem with missing players since the end of last year — their team was devastated by player departures, including most of the core players that carried the team since they started walking the road of success three years ago.

All except three have returned home after a short hiatus to the Belgrade Blue Dragons, but since most are now back, the Dukes have no reason to be substantially worse than last year. In fact, their new Athletic Director, Blaža Bojić, says he’s optimistic about the possibility of finishing as the best team in the group.

“I had, at the beginning of the season, said that this is a season in which we won’t worry about the result, because we lost nine Serbian national team players. Now we have six back, and as far as the result goes, my goal is to finish number one in the group … The first two or three rounds will pass in getting to know other teams. Until we can see everybody, I’m thinking the Devils and the Vukovi are the best teams, and we’ll try to get first place, even though it will be mighty hard against any of those teams”, says Bojić.

One thing he brings to the table is championship experience, including a CEFL championship in 2006. Then a member of the Wild Boars coaching staff, Bojić was among those that helped save that team last year, eventually surprising many and winning the Serbian championship. In his career, though one of the Vukovi founders, the teams he was on had the most success against the Belgrade team.

“The whole process was extremely quick. They offered me the head coaching position, but having the experience from Kragujevac, where, I think a head coach has to be with the team constantly, I couldn’t agree to that, so we came up with me being the Athletic Director and coach of three positions — offensive, defensive line, and quarterback.”

“What I insisted on was the individual work. They complained that it was too long, but if I had had my say, it would’ve been even longer. They were always well prepared, but now they’re even better, Marko [Milinkov, conditioning coach] did an outstanding job with that.”

What remains unknown is who’ll be the team’s quarterback. Although Juhas is back with the team, last year’s backup, Rastko Jokić, even in 2008 said he wants to play the position. To that, Bojić simply says we’ll have to wait for the first game of the season.

“Day in and day out, we see progress”.

That is, he says, what he’s most pleased with. Whether it will be enough remains to be seen, in the Dukes’ case, as well as the Silverhawks’.