Soul Look For Repeat Performance Against Tampa Bay

By Matt Leon

The Philadelphia Soul will be back home on Friday night as they welcome the 6-6 Tampa Bay Storm to the Center.

Fans of the Soul can only hope Friday's game goes as well as Philadelphia's first meeting with Tampa Bay. Back on May 23rd, the Soul put it all together down in Florida, dismantling the Storm, 71-27.

"That's the best game we played all season," Dolezel says. "We won all three phases and we won them strongly."

Listen to the entire interview with the Soul's Clint Dolezel

While that was the best performance for the Soul here in 2015, most of the other ones have been pretty good, too.

Philadelphia is 11-2 on the season and that has them alone in first-place in the Arena Football League's Eastern Division. They enjoy a four-game lead on second place Cleveland.

The 11th win for the Soul came on Saturday as they traveled out to California and beat the now 2-10 Los Angeles Kiss, 56-48.

"Anytime you go to the West Coast from the East Coast," Dolezel tells KYW Newsradio, "three hour difference, start their time at eight o'clock, which is eleven our time and finish at basically one o'clock in the morning and you can get a win, it doesn't matter who you're playing, you're just happy to get out of there. And LA is much improved, they're going to give teams fits over there towards the end."

The schedule makers didn't do the Soul any favors by following up a cross-country trip and Saturday night game with a short week and a game the following Friday.

"Tough, no doubt," Dolezel says. "We got back (home) at midnight on Sunday night. So short week, we were suppose to practice on Monday, we didn't get a chance to practice, we gave the guys some rest, we watched the film, got it out of the way. Basically we're only practicing two days this week. But there is a silver lining, we've got a bye week right after that so we get to rest up a little bit. Hopefully we can make it through that without any injuries."

While the Soul did dominate Tampa in that first meeting, Dolezel says they can't take the Storm for granted this time around.

"We've got to play well," Dolezel says. "The bottom line is we've got to make the plays when they're there. I think that's another reason the LA game was so close, we didn't make a lot of the plays that we normally do. So we've got to go out and execute, that's the bottom line. Doesn't matter who you're playing and how bad you beat them the first time, or how bad you got beat the first time. You go out and execute. With the talent we have here, we'll be good in the end."

Philadelphia and Tampa Bay kickoff at 7:30pm on Friday.

You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattleonkyw.