Bert Faibish
Ticats.ca
You can hear a pin drop in the Celebration Banquet Hall at McMaster University.
The usually boisterous and outgoing group of men that fill this place at lunch time are nowhere to be found, replaced mostly by quiet, tired individuals whose only interest is in the meal at hand.
It’s the day after the team’s first preseason tilt with the rival Argos and you can see the effects of eight days of training camp plus one live game written all over their exhausted faces.
When I try to imagine how they’re feeling I’m taken back to my days of high school ball, or even my time coaching summer OVFL football.
However, these things just aren’t the same.
These are grown men, some of whom are approaching 300 pounds, who day after day batter each other on the practice field in an attempt to make the team or to show coaches they are still capable of playing at a high level.
Add hours of meetings, daily workouts, and countless time poring over their playbooks, and what you have is a recipe for exhaustion.
Now I’m not making excuses, these guys are privileged enough to play a game they love for a living, but I don’t think that people fully comprehend the level of mental and physical fatigue that football players push through on a day-to-day basis during training camp.
Now that the first game is behind them the real toll of camp is setting in. Each live collision between players in a game is comparable to a small car accident, and believe me, these guys know how to hit.
A game takes a player at least the week or so until the next opponent to recover.
In the preseason there is no such luck.
There’s no time to rest aching and weary bodies. The time you take off to heal an injury that isn’t considered major may suddenly become longer than you planned, as your spot is taken by someone healthier than you.
During the season you can rest easy in the assurance that you’ve made the team, for this season at least, your job is safe. In fact you are encouraged to heal up as best you can before the next time the team takes the field.
Camp offers very little of that luxury and instead players have only the time that they’re asleep to really heal before that alarm goes off and it begins all over again.
As a football fan I appreciate the hard work and sacrifice that these guys put in to make sure the product on the field is the very best.
I could argue that I love football as much as any of the guys, but when I see what training camp is really like, I just feel fortunate I get to watch from the press box.
