Training camp Kelly-style runs with military precision

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2009 (5953 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As part of their pitch for the fast-paced, professional environment in which they work, army recruiters in the U.S. used to say in TV ads that they “do more by 8 a.m. than most people do all day.” Well, after just over a week of training camp coach Kelly-style, I may not be able to match that same assertion, but we do get a whole lot done during the course of a typical training camp day.

Rise and shine begins every morning with a 5:45 wake-up call to all the rooms in the hotel where we are staying. We have a mandatory check-in for breakfast that closes at 6:45 a.m. and then it’s over to the stadium to get taped, stretched, padded up and on the field by 7:45 a.m. Practice typically begins with a special teams walk-through period to go over all that will be practised that day. It is then followed by defensive and offensive walk-throughs, once again going over what is new for the day.

The reason for these walk-throughs is simple. Coaches do not like to waste time and reps during a live fire drill, reiterating where and what their athletes should be doing on any given play. When we get to the primary components of practice like inside run, team, and pass skelly, coaches want the players to be running the new instalments at full speed, so walk-throughs at the start of practice make sure the mental components of the day’s new material are taken care of and the physical is all that needs to be executed thereafter.

When the morning practice concludes around 10 a.m., players that have been requested that day meet with the local and national media for interviews and then hit the locker-rooms to change and shower off the morning’s blood, sweat and tears. At 11 a.m., meetings begin with individual position groups, where our position coaches review and critique one or more of the major drills outlined above. This kind of format gives the player immediate feedback on what was either done correctly or incorrectly in practice, and the appropriate corrections while it is still fresh in their mind. Then sometime by midday, the team is released for lunch back at the hotel.

The next few hours are the main benefit of having split two-a-days during training camp: recovery time. You have around two hours to go back to your hotel room and catch a quick nap, study the instalments for the upcoming afternoon, or bang out a column on your laptop for the following morning’s newspaper. The afternoon kick-starts again with the offence meeting from 2 p.m. to 2:45 while the defence gets dressed and taped for practice No. 2. Then at 2:45, the offence gets taped and dressed and the defence goes into meetings and watches the remainder of the morning’s practice.

The second practice of the day kicks off at 3:30 in the afternoon and follows pretty much the same schedule as the morning. Special teams and offensive and defensive walk-throughs, followed by group warm-ups, individual drill and skill refinement, special teams, inside run, pass skelly, one on ones, team and special teams once again. When all is said and done it’s around 5:30 p.m. and time for the next team meal at the hotel.

We usually start up at 7:30 p.m. again that night with a team meeting, which under this regime has included a lot of former Winnipeg football greats like Dave Black and Brett McNeil taking a few minutes out of their day to impress upon the new additions to the team just exactly who and what we are playing for. After the team meeting we transition into special teams again followed by our individual meetings where we are once again reviewed and corrected on the afternoon’s practice.

When it’s all said and done for the night, it’s often past 10 and the last thing to do on the list is to crash and possibly sit in a cold tub for 10 minutes or so before you turn in. We may not do more than most people by 8 a.m. like the U.S. army recruiters claim, but over the course of a week of consecutive 16-hour days, we sure are in a hurry for the regular season to kick into gear.

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.