Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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www.BLUEANDGOLD.com MAY 2020 17 Nashville, Tenn., after a win over Vanderbilt when the cancellation dominoes started to fall. The Irish baseball team was in Vir- ginia for a weekend series against Radford University. The Notre Dame tennis teams were about halfway into their spring schedules. The Irish rowers were two days from opening their season in Oakridge, Tenn. And a couple of Irish winter sports programs — fencing and indoor track and field — had their national championships up next when word came down. This pandemic is disrupting sports locally and abroad more than any other event in American history. The lone relatively recent com- parison to today's coronavirus chaos comes from the Sept. 11 terrorist at- tacks in 2001 when air travel and ath- letics were grounded for about a week. Those few days without sports from 19 years ago seemed eternal and in- tolerable at the time, even with a clear timeline on when competition would resume. The uncertainty that this pan- demic presents is more challenging to work through, mentally and logistically. "My hope is I'll have my guys here for summer school in June," Brey said. "But none of us has ever been through anything like this, so we just don't know." ✦ When social distancing guidelines were extended through the end of April, college football fans were forced to wonder if the 2020 season would start on time. Would it happen at all? While on ESPN's SportsCenter at the end of March, Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly shed some light on this topic by implementing an unofficial deadline for football activities to resume in order for the season to kick off on time. "From a player safety standpoint, we h ave to s ay, 'This is the date we can live with to get these young men p hys i ca l l y co n d i - tioned and ready to go into camp,'" he said. " To me, [it's] July 1." He later iterated that June 15 is ideal because strength a n d co n d i t i o n i n g coaches want six w e e k s w i t h t h e players in order to adequately prepare them for the rigors of the college foot- ball season. "College football is going to be affected if we're not playing in 90 days in terms of the conditioning element of getting these young men ready," Kelly said. Part of the problem is that almost every Notre Dame football player will go at least three months without access to much in terms of workout equipment. In the offseason, dozens of future, current and former Notre Dame players travel to Highland Park, Ill., to train at Win Performance with CEO Kerry Neal, a Fighting Irish linebacker from 2007-10. This includes NFL players such as Matthias Farley, Bennett Jackson, Michael Floyd and C.J. Prosise, plus current Irish players Ovie Oghoufo and Houston Griffith. Due to a city ordinance, Neal was forced to temporarily close Win Perfor- mance shortly after Notre Dame's spring break in order to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), leaving dozens of members of the Notre Dame football family without one of their favorite places to train. Similar ordinances and stay-at-home orders have forced gyms and training facilities to close throughout the United States. For years, the NCAA has lim- ited the number of padded practices a football program can have in a year, but the players are accustomed to a certain level of training and nutrition services year-round, and it's unclear what the impact will be. "Basketball guys can always go find a gym and hoop it up, and find a way to do some strength training on their own," Notre Dame head men's basketball coach Mike Brey said. "But football, losing all of that physical training, that's tough to make up. My outside look is football guys really need to be condi- tioned before they start hitting and doing their stuff." To combat this, the Notre Dame football staff is doing everything possible to make s u re t h e p l aye rs are prepared aca- demically and are in the best physical condition they can b e d u r i n g t h e s e trying times. "There's plenty of time for football," Kelly said on WSBT Radio's Sportsbeat. " We w a n t e d t o make sure that the structure was there, first and foremost academically with this transition. " Then, to have a uniform condition- i n g p ro g ra m fo r our football team. Those are the more important things right now. We can get to the foot- ball. If we're playing in the fall, we'll have enough time to catch up on the football." While the players are away, the staff depends on technology to make sure student-athletes are getting their workouts in on time. Each player was sent three different resistance bands, which allows them to train no matter their home situation, and an app tracks their progress. "We're using an app right now for our players that allows them to use their phones to actually complete their workouts and send them to us," Kelly said. "We get daily workouts completed so we can track the progress of our play- ers. It's pretty handy from that standpoint. It's called Strength Builder, which allows us to implement the band workouts." This can be done through a phone, laptop or iPad. Following the work- outs, the players are broken up into groups that meet with a strength and conditioning coach, who will help determine if a player needs to adjust the resistance used or not. "I feel really good about the organization of that and how we've been able to do that from a technology standpoint instead of a sports science stand- point," Kelly said. "I think we're leaning more heavily on the technology than the sports science." — Andrew Mentock With social distancing guidelines shutting down gyms and training facilities, Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said his program has utilized technology to stay in touch with the players and monitor their workouts. PHOTO COURTESY FIGHTING IRISH MEDIA Irish Football Relies On Technology To Stay Connected And Sharp