Each August marks the start of college football preseason camps. While fans welcome the start of camp as a harbinger of the season ahead, for the players, camp is a hell week lasting most of the month.
The camp goal is building the team’s foundation through an all-football-all-the-time existence. Coaches believe mutual suffering builds cohesion and team unity. During camp, everyone hurts either from contact or just soreness from all the running and hard work. It is easy to lose track of the day of the week, current events and even communication with anyone outside the program.
Up until a few years ago, camp was a series of two-a-day practices sometimes extending from a Monday though a Saturday afternoon scrimmage. It was 12 practices in six days followed by one practice and then another 12 practices in six days. Today the NCAA mandates that a team may not conduct two-a-day practices on consecutive days, so the week-long two-a-day ritual is a thing of the past.
It is not as tough as it used to be, and everyone’s heard that before.
No matter how old you are, older players will tell you how much tougher they had it. When I hear guys complain now, I remind them that their dorms are air-conditioned. In my first camp we stayed in non-air-conditioned South Halls dorms. One night the heat got so bad, I tried to sleep with my head in the mini-fridge.
As bad as that may have been, older Penn State guys stayed at the Civil Engineering Lodge at Stone Valley in a big hall shared by the whole team.
As nice a setting as Stone Valley may be, I’ll take South Halls.
Once I became a coach I realized that coaches didn’t necessarily think camp was the best time of the year either. It is mentally draining, and there are long hours working on schedules, practice scripts, film study and time away from families.
But all teams have coping mechanisms. Some guys grow mustaches during camp as a way to mark the passage of time. Thankfully, most are shaved when camp ends. Other years, video game tournaments in NCAA Football or Halo have marked the passage of time.
Then there are the freshman rituals.
When I coached at the University of Virginia, upperclassmen gave the freshman new haircuts. One freshman got a Friar Tuck haircut, and another long-haired freshman had the hair on one side of his head completely shaved while the other side went untouched. From one side it looked as though nothing had happened until he turned and you saw all the hair gone on the other side.
Today that is considered hazing; then it was something to be endured to join the team.
At Penn State, the rite of passage was freshmen entertainment. Freshmen had to come up with entertainment each night at dinner. If the entertainment was lacking, the offenders were required to sing ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ complete with all the hand motions of ‘here is my handle, here is my spout.’
Nightly freshman entertainment evolved into one camp-ending show, complete with skits poking fun at coaches and teammates. Joe Paterno, a frequent target, generally laughs harder than anyone when he is imitated with glasses, rolled up slacks and a high-pitched yell.
Each camp day ends with curfew and bed check. My first year of coaching, I had a Saturday night bed check. Sunday mornings the players could sleep in, so they were itching to sneak out after curfew. Virginia Head Coach George Welsh’s advice was to check them in late and to ignore some rooms. It wasn’t to allow them to ignore curfew, it was to trap the guys who planned to sneak out after they’d been checked in.
Sure enough, at Sunday afternoon’s practice running back Terry Kirby came up to me and asked where I was for bed check. He admitted that they had waited a half hour or more for us to check them in before giving up and going to sleep.
No matter how early or late the curfew, morning rolls back around too quickly. At Penn State, the wake-up call is a ‘friendly’ air horn. The air horn replaced the old buzzer I hated as a player. I’d hear it faintly at first, then louder and louder until it was right outside my door. I hated that sound – and I still get a chill when I think of lying in that bed listening to the approaching buzzer.
Coaching at James Madison University in 1994, we had a PA system to wake the team. The last morning we blasted the helicopter scene from ‘Apocalypse Now’ complete with Wagner’s ‘Ride of The Valkyries’ and concluding with the famous line uttered by actor Robert Duvall: ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning. … Smelled like … victory.’
No matter how the camp day starts or ends, the ultimate goal is to build a team capable of that goal – Victory. Until someone finds a better way, camp will be endured to unite a diverse collection of young men into a cohesive team ready for opening day.
But it’ll never be as tough as it used to be …
