Get off your couches, frustrated former high school football linebackers: LA KISS, the Arena Football League team partly owned by Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, is holding open tryouts Saturday at Santa Ana College.
This isn't a publicity stunt.
Coach Bob McMillen says he hopes to enlist five players for the professional team's inaugural training camp.
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McMillen's own nine-year AFL playing career began after he was chosen at an open tryout. And, he tells City News Service, as coach for three seasons with the league's Chicago Rush, he used open tryouts to pick up players who “hadn't played in a few years that were still hungry to try to get an opportunity to play professional football.”
The tryout will include the 40-yard dash, a short shuttle run, long jump, medicine ball toss, running around cones and positional drills, McMillen noted.
Like everything associated with KISS (and especially Simmons), you have to pay to try to get an opportunity to play. There's a $75 registration fee if you pay in advance or $100 at the tryout. Registration begins at 8 a.m., the tryouts at 9 a.m. Call 714.462.KISS.
LA KISS makes its AFL debut March 15 in San Antonio. The home opener at the Honda Center in Anaheim is April 5 against the Portland Thunder.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.