In just over 30 days the USA Men’s 7s team will take the field in the Olympics for the first time in 92 years, and we still don’t know who will be on the team.

Of course, we’ve all got a good idea, and so does NBC, which has featured captain Madison Hughes during Olympic promos. Hughes, who is hard at work in pre-Olympic training right now, knows full well he isn’t guaranteed a spot on the plane to Rio, but he’s got to do the promos anyway.

“When I was doing those promos, I was trying to talk on behalf of the team and give the team a voice,” said Hughes. “There are a lot of factors to consider and I couldn’t say ‘this is how I feel about it’ because I don’t if I’ll be there. So I said ‘we’re excited as a group.’”

Everyone wants to be there, of course, and they are working enormously hard to get there. The players are going through a very rigorous series of workouts to prepare - more rigorous in many ways than the just-completed World Series season.

“We call it another preseason with a big conditioning focus,” said Hughes. “With how hard and fast the tournaments went from December to May, we didn’t have much time to get those lengthy conditioning blocks hilt into those tours. We know we’ve only got a few weeks to get that match fitness built in for Rio.

“You can’t sustain the sort of volumes you’d want during the season, and that’s something we can do now. We can sustain volumes and have more intense weeks back-to-back-to-back.”

And as they do that, working hard for their own individual dreams of being an Olympian, the players also have to think team first. It’s an approach that challenges an individual’s discipline. And then there’s the thought about what you do once you get there.

“We’re not just going there to make up the numbers,” said Hughes. “We’ve set our goals and we’ve been vocal at times about what we want to achieve in the Olympics. It’s about doing a job when we get there. But it’s also a bit of a weird one because it’s been a few months since we’ve played in a tournament and everyone’s a bit of an unknown. Even though you’ve been training, you don’t know exactly where you’re at in relation to the other teams. All you can do is focus on yourself and try to do the best you can.”

The USA is definitely an unknown entity, and perhaps, to use a British expression, a banana skin for other teams. You overlook them at your peril, and given some of the tournament finishes in the last year or so, the Eagles are one of several medal contenders. But they’ve also bee inconsistent.

“There were a couple of tournaments where we weren’t playing at the level we wanted, but we’ve had some time of reflection, looking at what we did wrong,” said Hughes. “We had several tournaments where we were up there with any team in the world. So all we can do is look at it, keep moving forward, and put in a good performance in Rio. What we’ve done a good job since Mike [Friday] and [Brownie [Chris Brown] took over was just getting in a good place and putting in one performance and looking to your next job.”

Except the next job is the Olympics.