Normally, Greenwood football coach Mike Campbell would lose his mind if he caught players texting or teasing one another while he or one of his assistants was talking during a team meeting.
But during the times that Campbell has been addressing his players in a Google Meet chat room this spring, he can’t help but laugh when he sees the back-and-forth jabs being thrown in the chat window to the side.
In this day and age — when the COVID-19 pandemic has forced everyone to learn to communicate from a distance — even the most hard-nosed coaches have had to learn to be flexible.
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“You have to change with the times and let those kids have that sense of normalcy a little bit,” Campbell said. “It’s just good to see those guys ribbing each other a little bit, that locker room banter that you miss by not being in the locker room or the weight room.”
Football teams that would have normally spent parts of this spring working out together had to adjust on the fly with schools closed since mid-March and stay-at-home orders in place.
Workout plans had to be rewritten since most players don’t have access to full sets of weights at home. Perhaps more importantly, the sense of camaraderie that comes from being around your teammates on a regular basis can’t be truly replicated.
“There’s a factor of team that you’re trying to maintain,” Whiteland coach Darrin Fisher said.
To that end, the Warriors are conducting group video chats three days a week. Each January, Fisher divides his team into eight groups, with a coach and captain assigned for each. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the designated coaches will head up a discussion for their groups, with the captains leading a video workout afterward.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Whiteland players record video of their own individual workouts and post them so that team members can keep tabs on one another.
The hope is, Fisher says, that players will work harder knowing that their teammates will be watching.
“Everything you do or everything you don’t do affects the team,” he said. “Seeing each other live, you’re trying to maintain that accountability factor and you’re trying to maintain that team factor as best as you can.”
The accountability portion can be difficult to maintain when the players are physically separated. Center Grove’s team has been conducting Zoom meetings by position group, and each graduating class has its own group chat as well — but when it comes to doing workouts, the players are on their own. Longtime Trojans coach Eric Moore worries about how his underclassmen will be affected by not having that in-person push from the older players.
“We have a very talented (rising) sophomore group, probably one of the biggest in numbers and size,” Moore said, “and those kids are the ones that sometimes aren’t real motivated. And what they lose is, they lose the senior leadership all winter long, and from March 13 on, they’ve had no leadership, and to expect to do things on their own is sort of hard if they’ve never been in the program.”
It’s also hard without access to all of the school athletic facilities — but players all around the county have been trying to make the most of what they do have available at home.
“A lot of them don’t have access to weights and things like that,” Campbell said, “but we talk to them about like, on step-ups, grab a heavy object, a bag of salt, fill your backpack with books, things like that just to add weight and resistance. Any object that has some mass to it can work for you. We’re really improvising a lot of things.”
“That’s the one cool thing about a bunch of our kids,” Center Grove senior-to-be Carson Steele said. “Everybody’s sending us videos and stuff in Zoom meetings, and they’ll have paint buckets and stuff, and they have big poles they’re carrying on their backs. Just crazy stuff, just trying to keep in shape and do stuff. I’m just glad that everybody’s staying motivated through this hard time, because everybody wants to play football.”
Reports leaking out of some corners of the state have hinted at or explicitly talked about various teams ignoring the stay-at-home orders and national distancing guidelines. Local coaches, however, have insisted that their players adhere to the regulations for as long as they’re in place.
“These other schools are doing it, and I don’t know how they’re not getting in trouble,” Moore said. “Plus, it’s a national medical pandemic, and I don’t know how they can say, ‘Let’s get together and lift weights,’ and run here and do that — I’m not promoting any of that.”
No matter how much the players and coaches might miss bonding with one another, there is an understanding that keeping people safe and healthy is paramount.
“We are basically just encouraging them to stay active and keep training to the best of their ability, but to respect and follow the social distancing protocols,” Franklin coach Chris Coll said.
In terms of the specifics, each coach has chosen to approach this spring quarantine time differently. At Greenwood, Campbell has been installing pieces of the offense and defense, breaking down film in group meetings and covering as much of the mental side as possible while there are limitations on the physical side.
At Whiteland, meanwhile, Fisher has decided that the Xs and Os can wait. His primary focus right now is on the overall well-being of his players, some of whom might be food insecure or in need of extra academic assistance.
One of the big challenges for coaches is not knowing how long the current quarantine restrictions will be in place. That uncertainty of not knowing how long players need to remain separated — or how and when the preseason will begin — can make it hard to plan very far ahead.
“We’ve got to have a timeline,” Moore said. “At some point, you’ve got to draw a line saying, ‘Well, start here, we’re going to end there.’ … I’ve got a zillion things to choose from that I can do, but my coaches are driving me crazy right now about this. I’m like, ‘Until I know something, I don’t know anything.’ I don’t know the when, the how or the what. Nobody does, on any aspect.”
No matter what the coming months look like, one thing’s for sure — whichever athletes and teams can combine the self-motivation and resourcefulness to make the most of the current situation will have a huge advantage over the competition when play does resume.
That’s the message that coaches have been trying to deliver.
“You have an opportunity here during this time to really gain ground,” Fisher said. “All the things that you said you wanted to do, you have the opportunity and the time to catch up on those things and to pass other people by. If you want to be a better student, you have the time right now to do all the reading and all the studying and all the stuff you want to do to be a better student.
“There are no excuses right now for you not to be what you want to be, and we’re choosing to look at it that way.”
