University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: No Lazy Summer For Tar Heels
July 12, 2006 | Football
July 12, 2006
By Adam Lucas
For college football players, mid-July is the offseason.
At least, it's supposed to be the offseason. But maybe those words belong in quotation marks. Maybe it should really be "the offseason."
That's what senior defensive tackle Shelton Bynum thinks when his alarm blares every weekday morning at 6:30 a.m. If it was truly the offseason, if he was truly taking a break, it's unlikely he'd be getting up this early.
But Bynum and the rest of his Carolina teammates are busy. The calendar may claim this is a break for them, but players and coaches know the summer is also a time when plenty of progress is made.
For many college students, summer means late nights, late mornings, long lunches, and afternoons at the pool. For Bynum, it means this:
"I'll be up each day at 6:30," he says. "I'll be at Kenan by 7 to run or lift. I'll finish up by 8:30 and head to class. Then I'll be back at Kenan by 3 and run or lift again. On Mondays and Wednesdays, the players organize team workouts, and those are usually finished by 5:30. Then it's back home to grab a nap, study, eat, and then it's time to go to bed and wake up and do it all over again."
The running and lifting Bynum mentions isn't a casual YMCA-type workout. Defensive linemen have an approximately 30-minute circuit to complete in the weight room that include at least 400-pound squats, 300-pound bench presses, and 300-pound power cleans.
Running isn't a lazy jog on the treadmill. It's constant sprint work for a full hour, with only a five-minute breather if strength and conditioning coach Jeff Connors is in an especially jolly mood.
The squad, which officially reports for training camp on August 3, has also continued the player-organized workouts many cited as being beneficial last season. The optional sessions aren't designed to provide replacements for training camp workouts. Instead, they're meant to serve as reinforcement for older players and crash courses for newer ones on the basic concepts that will be taught at camp.
"There's been more commitment to those this summer," sophomore safety Trimane Goddard says. "It's been very worthwhile because everything is designed by the players. From the time periods to the things we're doing, the seniors are leading us and they make sure every group gets a certain number of repetitions."
For Goddard, those repetitions are still somewhat limited. He estimates that he is approximately 90 percent recovered from the broken foot he suffered in February. His rehab has limited his participation in the full conditioning program; until about two weeks ago, he was primarily doing most of his running in a swimming pool and riding an exercise bike to maintain stamina.
He's had plenty of company in the training room--fellow defensive back Jacoby Watkins is also on the way back from injury. Watkins, a senior, is ahead of Goddard's progress and has been more involved with summer conditioning. Both players expect to be 100 percent on August 3.
Connors will conduct conditioning tests over the next week before second session summer classes end on July 25. Unlike last year, when there was an undesirable long layoff between the end of summer classes and the start of camp, the final day of exams falls just five days before the reporting date. That's good for physical conditioning but doesn't provide much time to mentally recharge.
"This is a very hard time of the summer," Bynum says. "There are some tired people around here. You can see the conditioning work coming to an end, but you can't let up even though you see that small break coming up. To do what we want to do this season, we've got to keep pushing. There are no breathers."
Of course not. After all, it's the offseason.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. He is the coauthor of the official book of the 2005 championship season, Led By Their Dreams, and his book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about Going Home Again, click here.
