The Redskins Blog

Redskins Chat With Troops

One last Veterans Day link, because I didn’t see it on Veterans Day: Phillip Daniels, Chris Cooley, Fred Smoot, Rock Cartwright, and Renaldo Wynn do a webchat with U.S. Troops stationed in Iraq.

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A Veteran's Day Practice

It could be argued that this entire Redskins season has felt cold, dreary, and rainy; today the weather during the practice matched. So it was probably a good thing that, in honor of Veterans Day, the Redskins hosted 25 servicemen and -women from the Southeast Veterans Service Center in Washington, DC. The veterans were allowed to watch practice, given lunch, and then had a chance to meet players and coaches and get some autographs.

And after that, it was one of those mutual admiration societies, with the vets thrilled to meet the players, and the players honored to meet the veterans. Read more »

Wednesday, November 11: Veterans Day Links

Practice has been rescheduled this morning because of weather, and that always confuses my schedule of posts. So I’m starting this Veterans Day off with some links. Since most of these have nothing to do with Veterans Day, though, I’ll open with this link to a Mental Floss compilation of videos of dogs welcoming soldiers home (via @Unsilent).

More Redskins-centric links below. Read more »

Redskins Play Guitar Hero For (And With) The Troops

Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day, so it was appropriate that a number of Redskins players used their Tuesday off to do something for our troops. Admittedly, it’s a little unexpected that that “doing something” was more accurately described as “playing video games,” but it seemed to make all sides happy, so who am I to complain.

The Pro Vs. G.I. Joe program is a non-profit organization partnered with the USO that uses online gaming and internet videoconferencing to allow deployed soldiers a chance to chat and play video games with professional athletes and — wherever possible — their families back home.

So the players came into the meeting room, where the Pro Vs. G.I. Joe staff had set up the video equipment, and they were joined by local troops from Ft. Myer and the Marine barracks in D.C. and families of some of the deployed troops on the other end of the videoconference.

Greg Zinone founded the program with his wife Addie, a staff sergeant in active Army Reserve Public Affairs. “You know,” he said, “me not being a military person, I had no idea what goes on overseas. She told me that they play video games on their downtime; I know from my days playing football at West Virginia that that’s all we did after practice. We put the two together about two and a half years ago and we’ve going pretty strong ever since.” Read more »