Dec. 28, 2011
Imagine moving your business and more than 200 employees to a new city to operate just as you would at your home location for a week? Challenging, daunting and burdensome are all words that would aptly describe the logistical nightmare the business would face. The thought of moving an entire business operation for a one-week period is a reality for 70 Division I college football teams that have already or are preparing to play in bowl games this season.
Every team in a bowl game suspends operations at home and sets up shop at the location of their bowl game for a week in advance of the game, and every part of their preparation is the same as if they were at home, except of course that they are not at home. Instead of Vanderbilt’s football headquarters being housed in the McGugin Center on campus, the Commodores are calling the historic Peabody Hotel in Memphis its temporary football home.
To transform Memphis into Vanderbilt’s home, the Commodores rely on a support staff that includes operations assistants, the strength and conditioning staff, athletic trainers, the video crew and the equipment staff. Each department is charged with making sure the Commodores have the same resources at their disposal as they do at home. To help do this, the directors of these departments made advance site visits to Memphis in the days after the bowl invitation was accepted as well as reached out to key contacts to prepare them for the move.
“The first thing I did after the announcement was call the SEC team that was here last year, which was Georgia,” said Luke Wyatt, Vanderbilt’s equipment manager. “I also talked to a couple of teams that had been here before last year to get an idea of practice sites and how they handled their laundry and securing equipment.”
The coaching staff opted to make Memphis University School their training headquarters. The school is the alma mater of former Vanderbilt linebacker John Stokes and current linebacker DeAndre Jones, and offers facilities that mirror or exceed what can be found at many small colleges.
The practice facility is located approximately 25 minutes from the Peabody Hotel. The team hotel doubles as Vanderbilt’s operations headquarters and place of rest. Hotel meeting rooms are where players and coaches gather for position meetings, staff meetings and team meetings every day. The video department operates out of another room, cutting up video footage from practices for coaches to view. Yet another room is transformed into a training room for players to receive treatment and rehab injuries.
To make Vanderbilt’s time away from home possible, it meant Vanderbilt’s support staff had to move its entire operation with it. It is a routine that is done to a much smaller degree for regular season road games throughout the season … only this time it is magnified exponentially. Instead of staying just one night and not practicing for a typical road game, the Commodores will spend six nights in Memphis and practice five times.
The equipment staff transported virtually its entire storage room to Memphis to ensure there were enough jerseys, pants, socks, etc. for the entire team over the course of a week’s worth of practices. “Packing for this bowl is one that you have to pack for cool weather, warm weather and cold weather so we have everything packed,” said Wyatt, who has a staff of 19 with him in Memphis. “Basically the entire equipment room moved.”
Also packing heavier than normal was the training staff which doubled the number of modalities and brought five times as much tape with it as it typically would for a road game. The video department also hauled its full arsenal of cameras along with editing equipment. Needless to say, there isn’t much left in Vanderbilt’s football offices on campus.
Even though Vanderbilt is just a few years removed from the 2008 Music City Bowl, the experience this year has been much different with the game being played in an away city.
“When we played in the Music City Bowl, we didn’t have to pack up everything from the hotel because we were going back to our facility,” said Tom Bossung, Vanderbilt’s head athletic trainer. “We did pack up a training room because most of our time was spent at the hotel and that is where we did training and rehab. It was convenient because if we forgot something or needed something, we could just jump in the car and go back and get it.”
Something Bossung and his training staff have also come to realize is that they have an expanded role in the week leading up to a bowl game. In addition to serving the student-athletes, the staff is also viewed as the primary medical providers for the entire travel party, which is also displaced from home for a week.
“Our job is to take care of the athlete and when you are on a trip like this and you are away from home for a week, we also become the primary medical providers for basically the entire travel party,” Bossung said. “It is something that a lot of people forget about.”
To haul everything to Memphis, the support staffs began packing early last week and loaded virtually everything they could into Vanderbilt’s 18-wheeler on Dec. 21 after the team’s final practice before Christmas break. At 6 a.m. Monday morning, members of the support staff loaded the final pieces of equipment onto the truck and staffers hopped on to a bus and headed to Memphis to begin unloading and setting everything up before the team arrived by 2 p.m. that afternoon.
The majority of the equipment was delivered to Memphis University School where it will stay throughout the week. Vanderbilt’s players dress in the MUS football locker room, the coaches dress in a separate locker room and Vanderbilt’s training staff utilizes the school’s training room. Monday night, due to unfavorable outdoor conditions, the school’s gym even served as an indoor training facility for the team.
The team will practice at MUS the rest of this week leading up to Saturday’s game. To prepare for each practice, members of Vanderbilt’s support staff depart from the hotel by bus nearly two hours before the team. And just like the team, the staff also receives a police escort to the practice site to add to the experience of playing in a bowl game.
After arriving at the practice location, the equipment staff prepares the locker rooms for the players and coaches. The to do list includes ensuring the proper jerseys, cleats and knee braces are placed in the correct lockers and checking helmets in the players’ locker room. The setup in the coaches’ locker room includes hanging up sweats, laying out razors, bottles of mouthwash and having snacks on hand.
“Our objective is to make the players and coaches feel at home and that they don’t even know the difference,” said Wyatt. “At MUS, they have 101 lockers so we don’t have to double up with anybody. Every coach also has his own locker. They are not less anything; it is just like being at home.”
Also setting up for the team’s arrival at the same time is the athletic training staff and video crew. The video crew prepares its cameras to shoot practice, checking batteries and video cards on each camera. The staff also haul their camera equipment outside to their shooting locations for practice. Two of the locations are in opposite end zones where to members of the staff operate a camera while being harnessed on top of a scissors lift that towers above the goal posts.
Simultaneously, members of Vanderbilt’s athletic training staff, which includes five certified athletic trainers and four student interns, prepares the training room and sets up stationary training tables outside the locker room. While some focus on preparing everything inside, others spend time filling up water bottles and stocking coolers with ice and Gatorade to haul outside. In addition to its training staff, Vanderbilt will also have five team physicians on the sideline for the bowl game.
“We approach it like, ‘what would we do if we were in Nashville?’ And whatever we can do, we make it seem just like we are at home,” said Bossung of the staff’s approach to bowl week. “Some of that is not necessarily applicable. For example, at home, we have four stationary bikes in our training room. We don’t have stationary bikes here, but I can walk someone down to the fitness room and put them on the stationary bike for 10 minutes. We utilize the hotel services if we need to.”
The combined efforts of Vanderbilt’s support staff has the Commodores preparing for Saturday’s game as they would any other game during the regular season, while also keeping the team on schedule for all of the events and activities that make bowl week unique and special.
So even though Vanderbilt’s football operations are taking place 200 miles from campus, everything at the hotel and practice site are in place for the players to seamlessly transition from one obligation on the daily itinerary to the next, just as they would if they were in Nashville.
That’s the goal of each of the support staff units. It isn’t home, but their objective is the same: to make the players and coaches feel as though they are as close to home as they can be without actually being there. It is the role they will play every day this week.
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