Training camp won’t come until late July. But new head coach Mike McCarthy is already thinking about getting down to business in Oxnard, California.
The Dallas Cowboys will hold camp once again in the seaside town of 200,000 just west of Los Angeles, staging their practice sessions on athletic fields that are used for local soccer games the other eleven months of the year. While McCarthy still has to get through his first free agency period and draft as the new coach in Dallas, he already has a West coast trip on the books in order to do a little scouting of the team’s camp location.
“I’m actually going to Oxnard here in a couple weeks. I’ll spend a day there,” McCarthy told media members last week at the NFL Combine, “just to walk the property. We’re going to meet out there just so I can see it, to see the operation and how it flows.”
Oxnard has been the site of the Cowboys’ camp since 2012. July’s camp will mark the Cowboys’ 16th overall there.
It will be a much different camp experience than McCarthy is used to. The Packers hold their summer practice sessions in Green Bay, at their own outdoor facility across the street from Lambeau Field. The players take up residence at tiny St. Norbert College, about 10 minutes away, living in the dorms and eating in the dining hall. It’s a Green Bay tradition that pre-dates even Vince Lombardi, with local kids lining up at the stadium to loan their bicycles to the players so they can ride into practice.
McCarthy will find the Cowboys’ California training camp tradition to be on a slightly more epic scale, as the entire organization is picked up and relocated 1,500 miles away. Merch tents. Food trucks. Live radio, TV, and internet broadcasts. Autograph sessions with the team’s cheerleaders. Media briefings from the owner. Shaded seating to handle attendance that tops 50,000 people. A hospitality deck. A beer garden. An economic boom of nearly $4 million to the local economy in just under a month. It is quite literally the circus coming to town.
But it’s an integral part of the hype machine that is the Dallas Cowboys. West Coast camps started as a way for the team to not only beat the Texas summer heat, but also for the club to build a dedicated fanbase outside the Lone Star State. It works; Cowboys supporters have notably nearly outnumbered Rams fans at recent games in Los Angeles.
And while veteran players might have gotten used to the Oxnard routine under Jason Garrett, this year’s camp could prove to be a whole new ballgame in Year One of the McCarthy regime.
“I have a proposed schedule that I’m thinking about already for training camp, but the function of it is obviously what’s most important. So we’re working on that, ” McCarthy said. “I’m excited about it. It makes sense to go there. I know everybody in the organization speaks very highly of the training camps out there. I think it’s something that’s needed for our football team, and I’m looking forward to working on that.”
[vertical-gallery id=640098][vertical-gallery id=639104][lawrence-newsletter]