Mizzou exercising caution as players return to workouts
The current coronavirus pandemic and resulting nationwide shutdown of college sports pretty well qualifies as unprecedented. Never before in modern college athletics have campuses been empty of athletes and both practice and play suspended for so long.
But as the Missouri football team returns to voluntary workouts this week, strength and conditioning coach Zac Woodfin is able to draw on a similar situation. Woodfin, the man charged with getting the Tigers’ roughly 100-man roster back in shape after about 12 weeks off campus, all while adhering to social distancing guidelines, thinks back to the season he got his first job with a football team.
The year was 2011, and Woodfin had been hired by the defending Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers as an assistant strength and conditioning coach. A lockout resulting from disagreement between NFL owners and players over the league’s collective bargaining agreement quickly threw a wrench in the team’s offseason training. From the time the Packers won the Super Bowl in early February until the lockout was resolved in late July, no players were able to step foot in the team facility.
“We had a very similar situation, it was an even longer layoff,” Woodfin said. “The only difference was there was no COVID, so guys could train wherever they wanted, they just couldn’t train in our building. They could never do minicamps or anything else.”
The two situations aren’t exactly analogous, but Woodfin said he learned an important lesson from the lockout: After a long break for players, the temptation may be to push them extra hard in an effort to make up for lost time. But doing so could backfire. Woodfin said that NFL workouts in 2011 saw an increase in lower leg and hamstring injuries.
“I was thankful to have that situation to look back on, learn from and try not to make the mistakes that some NFL teams made back in 2011,” Woodfin said. “The mistake was simply starting too fast. You have to be very intentional on slowly ramping up the things that you do with intensity, and knowing when to put the hammer down and when not to.”
Because of their voluntary nature, Woodfin was forbidden to disclose specifics of Missouri’s voluntary workouts, which began Monday. But he emphasized that the strength and conditioning staff has been taking great pains to be careful, both with the intensity of the workouts and minimizing infection risk.
Before entering the facility, Missouri players — and everyone else — must complete a questionnaire and have their temperatures taken in order to screen for possible coronavirus symptoms. Anyone running a fever or showing a symptom is immediately sent home. Missouri also tested all student-athletes upon their return to campus, though the university has not disclosed whether anyone has tested positive for COVID-19.
Once workouts begin, players are broken up into groups of 20, with each group working out at different times. Head coach Eliah Drinkwitz and his nine full-time assistants are prohibited from observing voluntary workouts, so all the in-person instruction falls to Woodfin and his four strength and conditioning assistants. That and the fact that players can’t all work out at once makes for 12- to 13-hour days, but he also said he’s used to that. Players are also required to remain six feet apart at all times, and equipment such as barbells are sanitized between each use.
“There’s hand sanitizers everywhere in the building, there’s education, just about proper hygiene,” Woodfin said. “We clean the bar, we clean everything after every single session. So those are a few things that we’ve done. The list is very long, but every precaution is taken and we really leave no stones unturned in terms of protecting our athletes and our staff that come to work.”
Woodfin may still be easing Missouri’s team into workouts, but based on what he’s seen the past four days, he’s optimistic about the team’s conditioning. He said the strength staff sent players suggestions for various workouts they could perform while campus was closed, with different options if they had access to weights or resistance bands or just their body weight. He praised the majority of players as “self-starters” who remained fit without coaches’ supervision.
“The guys that are back in voluntarily now,” Woodfin said, “I’m pretty proud of how they look and how they’re doing.”
No timetable has yet been set for when teams could begin mandatory workouts and, ultimately, fall camp, but Sports Illustrated reported Monday that the NCAA’s Football Oversight Committee could soon approve a plan that would allow most schools, including Missouri, to start football-related activities on July 13 and fall camp on Aug. 7. The Tigers’ first game is still scheduled for Sept. 5 against Central Arkansas.
If that timeline were to come to fruition, Woodfin believes Missouri’s team would be in good shape.
“I’m a very optimistic person, and I do believe two months is enough time to have our team ready to win,” he said. “... Coach Drink’s done a great job of putting the right people in the right places. Everyone’s in alignment, everyone’s pressing toward the same vision, so I’ve got no doubt that we’ll have the time to be ready to go.”