Riderville.com
For a third straight year the Saskatchewan Roughriders will be holding a minicamp in Bradenton, Fla. and the event goes this weekend from April 10-12 at the IMG Academy.
Roughly 70 players from across the U.S. and Canada will participate in the two-a-day workouts and the players come with a variety of football experience. There will be a handful of Roughrider veterans in attendance as well as CFL rookies straight out of the NFL, NCAA and CIS.
In 2013 — the year the Roughriders went on to capture the Grey Cup — the minicamp featured pretty much all veteran players while the club flipped its approach last year going with almost entirely rookies.
Riders Assistant GM Jeremy O’Day says this year the team is combining its approach.
“This is probably a combination in philosophy from 2013 and 2014,” O’Day told 620 CKRM’s SportsCage on Monday. “In ’13 we brought down a lot of the vets –- or as many as we could — because we had a new offensive coordinator and we wanted some time to implement the offence.”
“This year’s pretty similar in that route. We’ll also have a lot of guys on the defensive side of the ball that we will be evaluating. It’ll be a little bit of a combination of ’13 and ’14 with a similar format. They’ll be doing some individual drills, one-on-one’s and skelly and team work.”
The gates at IMG Academy will be open for any Rider fans who would like to take in the workouts, however they shouldn’t expect any crashing and banging.
“The Collective Bargaining Agreement doesn’t allow you to wear pads,” O’Day warned. “You can wear helmets so they’ll be outfitted nicely with jerseys and shorts but as far as the shoulder pads and stuff, you’ve got to keep those off because the CBA doesn’t allow it.”
In just two years of existence, these minicamps have proved their worth. In 2013 the Riders charged out of the gate with a franchise-best start of 8-1 while in 2014 they started 8-2. It can’t be a coincidence.
“I would hope it had something to do with it,” O’Day observed. “One thing we’ve done with these minicamps is we sped up the learning curve. The first couple days of training camp, everyone’s trying to figure out what the heck’s going on. You’re trying to learn the plays and you’re making mental mistakes that actually look bad physically. Hopefully with this you get a bit of a jump start.”
“Even certain things like the cadence for an offensive lineman. If it’s a different cadence, you’ve got to get used to that. Those couple times you jumped offside in training camp, hopefully you did that in minicamp and got that out of the way. You get more reps and hopefully it runs more smoothly. I hope that had something to do with that.”
Quarterback Darian Durant will be one of the veterans participating in this year’s workout and O’Day admits all eyes will be on the 10-year vet. Durant’s season – and likely the entire team’s – went down the tubes in early September last year when he tore a tendon in his throwing elbow. This weekend we’ll all find out exactly how far his rehab has come.
“Just the way the season ended last year, everyone’s real excited to see him out on the field throwing again in his normal spot,” O’Day continued. “It’ll be something that hopefully we’ll see him throw a couple and we can say ‘Ya he’s good, he’s back to normal and let’s start thinking about other stuff’.
The Riders will not make their minicamp roster public but O’Day was able to provide a few details on who will be in attendance.
“We’ll have probably 15-20 vets in total down there participating from Saturday’s practice on,” O’Day reported. “We won’t have many vets on Friday, maybe a few sprinkled in, but most will be on the field Saturday and Sunday.”
“They’ll be in the more team-structured practices rather than the one-on-one’s showing us what they can do. I don’t think the vets that we’re bringing down there are in much of an evaluation mode. For them it’s more of a learning thing. The rest of the guys will be evaluated and we’ll see how they fit with our team.”
Friday’s on-field session will accompany a classroom period in which the CFL neophytes will get a breakdown of the unique rules of Canadian football. O’Day said that’s always an eye-opening experience.
“You get guys looking around and their eyes get wide open when they see some of the rule differences from what they’re used to,” O’Day laughed. “When we go down to Florida, we tell them about the rule changes and implement those things so that when they come to camp they already understand it. For the receivers and the DBs, they get used to the waggle so they can start training for camp prior to that.”
Among the veterans expected in Florida are Durant as well as receivers Chris Getzlaf, Weston Dressler and Rob Bagg.
620 CKRM will be broadcasting the SportsCage live from the IMG Academy with shows on Monday, Saturday and Sunday at 4:00 pm MT.
