College football season a test of pain tolerance
Print
digg it!
Facebook
del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit
BY CURT McKEEVER / Lincoln Journal Star
As football players sell out their bodies for a victory, spectators are often left amazed by the violence of the sport unfolding before their eyes.
And yet, as they leave the scene of the battle, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that all it will take for the combatants to be ready to run through a brick wall next week is a day of rest and a regular practice routine.
That would be how it works for only the luckiest of major college football players.
Related Media
Game Day: Pregame Show - 9.13.08
Scott Young and Steven M. Sipple bring you all the pregame stories live from Studio 900 in the shadow of Memorial Stadium. (Anthony Roberts / JournalS...
For most, the fact of the matter is the grind of an almost never-ending season is about as pretty as what you’d expect to see on an episode of “Dirty Jobs.”
More than a true test of physical strength and stamina, it’s about about pain tolerance.
“There’s been times where you go into a game not knowing how you’re going to play because something’s hurting from the week before,” Colorado senior free safety Ryan Walters said. “There’s a lot of guys like that, and I don’t think people realize that. I don’t think they realize how painful it is when you hit somebody running full-speed.”
Nebraska head football athletic trainer Mark Mayer sees the effects of that wear and tear on a daily basis. Naturally, his main task is to do whatever he can to fight them off, thus making Bo Pelini’s job that much easier.
Because, if the Huskers have mostly sore-legged and bruised weapons, well, Pelini might be a defensive wizard, but good luck getting his guys to play at the speed and the reckless abandon needed.
And don’t think he needs that kind of machine only on Saturdays.
“You can have a point of being too physical and beating them up. It’s part of our jobs as coaches to figure that aspect of it out,” Pelini said. But “you can’t play physical on Saturday if you’re not going to practice physical during the week.”
It’s no surprise, then, that what keeps Mayer and his staff the busiest during the season is preventative maintenance. Kind of like it is for a lot of auto mechanics.
“Exactly. Your car’s not always going to run smooth every day, so we do things every day to just kind of keep these guys where they can go out and they can do what they need to do,” Mayer said. “Now, are they 100 percent perfect? More than likely not. Most people aren’t after they’ve just been involved in 70 plays of a 60 mile-an-hour car crash. Guys get sore, nicked up, beat up, and that’s kind of where we come in. ... For the most part, we’re just doing things to help guys get through, whether it’s day-to-day or week-to-week.”
On Sundays, Nebraska players are required to see the training staff for what Mayer terms “Med Call.” Those who have been injured in the previous day’s game or are coming back from a previous injury must show up at 10 a.m. for treatment and rehab. Trainers also often see soft-tissue damage that might have manifested overnight, and so they get a head start on treatment with electrical stimulation, contrast baths, manual stretching and active-release methods.
All of the Huskers who don’t have serious injuries then go through a conditioning run.
“We just get guys to get those legs moving to get some blood flow, get that lactic acid buildup out of there, just kind of work that soreness out,” Mayer said. “And then they will come back in and we’ll do treatments again. ... They’re getting in here a good three to five hours on Sunday.”
Most players have a lot quicker trip through the training room the rest of the week. But it takes a lot more than Mayer’s touch to get their bodies game-ready.
Tiring as practices can be, they’re almost always followed by demanding sessions in the weight room. There, the strength and conditioning program implemented by James Dobson pushes players to make gains through a build-up, break-down process that can be delicate.
“Practice, running and lifting every single day — that’s just something you have to gut through,” Husker junior linebacker Phillip Dillard said. “When you lift throughout the week, you take it seriously, because you need to keep your body strong because it’s going to be a long season.”
Equally important to performance as the muscle that athletes put on their frames is what they put inside them. And so, as Nebraska’s sports nutrition director, Brian Lehmann has the ears of the coaching staff.
“It’s night and day as far as the nutrition,” Dillard said when asked about what he puts his body through to get ready to play now compared to before he was in college. “If you’re always eating fried chicken, you’re going to be sluggish. I gotta have it every now and then, but since I’ve been eating better and lost the weight (he’s about 20 pounds lighter than he was a year ago) I’ve really felt a lot better than I have in a long time.”
Even with all that’s available, players recognize there are no guarantees about how their bodies will hold up.
As Mayer notes, “Athletes (from other sports) would probably argue, but football, it’s kind of a different beast.”
Most who play it accept their aches and pains without batting an eye.
Take Colorado’s Walters, for instance.
Fans who have watched him lay out more than a fair share of ball carriers the past three seasons would never suspect he tore his labrum in the seventh game of his freshman year. That’s because Walters missed just one game.
To have a better appreciation of that, the labrum is a ring of fibrocartilage that effectively stabilizes the shoulder joint. If it’s damaged, in addition to causing pain it usually brings about a decrease in range of motion and strength in the shoulder.
Walters — who while redshirting his first year broke a thumb early in fall camp and was forced to miss seven weeks of practice — didn’t have his shoulder surgically repaired until the end of last season.
He’d originally intended to go under the knife after his freshman year, but Colorado made a coaching change and so he felt he had to participate in spring practice to try and win a starting spot.
In 2006, he missed just one game with a stinger and elected not to have offseason surgery again because the Buffaloes were installing some new defensive schemes. Last year, Walters again played in all but one contest (he missed that after suffering a concussion), but his shoulder had become problematic enough that he finally got it fixed.
“Football isn’t for everybody, that’s for sure,” Walters said. “It’s a tough game. It’s a physical game, and the timid or weak cannot play football.
“I take pride in being a physical player and I love the physicality of what it means to be a safety in this league. So it wasn’t a problem for me to kind of knuckle up and keep playing and keep hitting. It’s paid off.”
And the shoulder?
“It’s great now,” he said.
Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.
