Inside Camp: Pitt football prepares for new campaign

Throughout August, new head coach Paul Chryst and the Pitt football team spent each day at…

Wide receiver Devin Street takes a moment to reflect during a practice at Pitt football training camp in early August.

Luv Purohit, Assistant Visual Editor

Throughout August, new head coach Paul Chryst and the Pitt football team spent each day at their facility on the South Side, partaking in a grueling training camp to prepare for the upcoming 2012 campaign. Leading up to our Football Preview on Friday, The Pitt News is proud to present a three-part series titled “Inside Camp” to give you a close-up of what life at training camp was like for the 2012 Panthers.

Part One: Rise and grind

While most Pitt students were packing their bags and getting ready to return to campus in the fall, members of the football team were already spending their nights in Sutherland Hall with noses buried in playbooks.

As students living in Oakland during the summer got to enjoy the final few weeks of a relatively deserted campus before classes started up again, the football players regularly spent roughly 14 hours a day at their practice facility in the South Side.

From Aug. 6-22, the Panthers took the field every day for approximately three hours, with an evening session added every other day once the second week of practice began. Training camp is a grueling time for college football teams across the country and a pivotal phase in the process of preparing for the season ahead. For two-and-a-half weeks in August, it’s all football, all the time.

“During camp, all you can do is think about football,” junior defensive lineman Aaron Donald said. “All football, all day. Once football’s over, you get a couple hours of rest, and then you got to get ready to come back out here and practice again.”

As any player on the team will attest, the two-a-day practices were especially tough. These were days that began at 6:30 a.m. and often didn’t end until 9:30 p.m. Hours upon hours were spent at the UPMC Sports Performance Complex on the South Side without returning to campus until long after the sun had set.

Once morning practice wrapped up around 11 a.m., the players moved gingerly back to the locker room to stretch, shower, hydrate, eat, watch film, get treatment from the trainers and generally rest up before hitting the field again for round two.

“It’s a lot of recovery and rest; it really is,” senior center Ryan Turnley said. “It’s about getting your body ready because these practices are hard, so it’s getting in the cold tub and keeping your legs fresh.”

The “cold tub,” as many of the players refer to it, is the ice bath that served as a daily fixture of post-practice procedure. Not only did it provide important physical restoration, it was also where many of the Panthers — rookies and veterans — bonded over their arduous schedule.

“It’s a good time when everyone’s in there, just joking around,” Turnley said.

“It is joke time; the locker room is joke time,” senior wide receiver Cam Saddler said. “When we step on the field, it’s serious, but the locker room is straight fun and games. It’s jokes; it’s fights; it’s everybody arguing. The best part about the locker room is probably the arguments because you can get as mad as you want. Arguments can get as heated as you want because you know it’s never going to come to fisticuffs.”

Saddler, like many of his teammates, also used the time before, after and in between practices to check his phone and keep an open line of communication between himself and the outside world.

“When I get on the bus [in the morning], that’s my Twitter time. From the time we leave until we get here, that’s the time I have to refresh all my tweets and catch up from last night because when we get here it’s just football mode,” Saddler said.

But Saddler also found time to reach out to his fans and followers once he finished morning practice.

“I’ll go in the locker room, send a couple texts out here and there, hit a couple girls up, see if everybody still loves me a little bit,” he joked.

For senior kicker Kevin Harper, even though he didn’t spend his days blocking 300-pound linemen or taking hits from chiseled linebackers moving at warp speed, the demanding training camp regimen wasn’t much different than that of his teammates. He and the other players on special teams took care of their bodies as much as anyone else, and he also claimed to have had just as much fun.

“We’re here, like, God knows how many hours a day, and if you just think about football the whole time, you’ll go crazy after three weeks,” Harper said. “There’s always team bonding and getting the freshmen involved a little bit, dunking them in the cold tub and stuff like that.

“But no hazing or anything like that, of course,” he added.

Be sure to check out part two of “Inside Camp” in Wednesday’s edition of The Pitt News.