First Portugal, now Birmingham. We are certainly piling up the miles as we prepare for the new BBL season.

Hopefully you will have kept in touch with our Portugal trip last weekend and you will realise what a busy few days we had.

The tour provided a lot of what we needed. It gave us a lot of camaraderie, good competition and some tough situations, all the kind of stuff we needed.

To be honest, the level of competition in Portugal surprised me and it's nice to see the league there picking up. I was impressed with the import players they have and the size and skills of the guys out there.

I was delighted to see us round things off with victory over a big name club like Benfica. That was maybe a little unexpected because, when we turned up the Aveiro gym that night, we were feeling really tired.

That's what I mean by tough situations but we sucked it up, as they say in the States, and played without doubt our best game of the whole trip.

Possibly the highlight of the trip was after that game. It was a pretty quiet Sunday night in Aveiro, which is a relatively small town, but we found one pub where it was karaoke night.

We had a great time. I would say Sterling Davis and Errol Seaman were the stars, followed by my assistant Steve Swanson.

It was a really funny night. Errol did most of the rap, Sterling did most of the rnb and me and Steve tackled the classic stuff like The Eagles.

I gave the guys the next day off to have a stroll around and relax. They needed it because we had spent seven days practising, travelling and playing those four tough games on successive nights.

We were really well looked after in Portugal. The guys certainly never went hungry. Under-taking a trip like that showed just how far this club has come and I would love to do something similar next year.

We practised at 8am on Tuesday before heading back to the airport in Lisbon but, to be honest, the trip took a lot out of the guys and practice was not that great this week. Despite that, we headed up to Birmingham looking forward to the next step in our progression.

We had a game with Brest today and tackle Sheffield tomorrow at 10am but we are not really too worried about who we play at this stage. I can see this team likes playing together and we went to the midlands with a realistic goal of trying to win the ournament.

We are also really looking forward to the game with Worthing Thunder at the Brighton Centre next Sunday. Word got through to us on Saturday night in Aveiro that they had opened their season with a big win and I know the coaching staff and players on both teams are excited about our local derby.

I hope to see you there and I have no doubt some of you will find your way to Aston Villa this weekend to see this team in action. I am confident you will find the trip worthwhile.

Nick Nurse is head coach of the Brighton Bears Basketball Club