Training camp will look very unusual for the 2020 Dallas Cowboys. From the Plexiglas dividers in the palatial locker room to the tarped-off seats in the team’s temporary meeting hall, from the mandatory monitoring checkpoints to the ultraviolet lightboxes for sanitizing phones and jewelry, right down to the proximity trackers the players will be wearing on their wrists.
All of those very out-in-the-open COVID-era add-ons will make for a surreal camp unlike any other. But there will be plenty of other behind-the-scenes changes, too, all implemented in hopes that the upcoming season can be salvaged amidst a global pandemic that has claimed 160,000 lives in the United States alone. Training camp will go on, but it sure won’t be business as usual.
Perhaps the most noticeable difference on Day One of Cowboys camp, though, will be the mercury. It’s not the heat, the old saying goes, it’s the humidity. For Friday, the first scheduled day in shells, Cowboys players and coaches will get a Texas-sized helping of both.
Temperatures are forecast to hit 101 degrees in north Texas on Friday, but it will feel like 106. By way of comparison, it will max out at a lovely 83 in Oxnard, California, where the Cowboys typically set up shop in August.
For his first camp as Cowboys coach, Mike McCarthy plans to subject players to the elements as much possible, using the natural-grass practice field at The Star in Frisco.
“My personal goal is to be on the grass,” he said during last week’s conference call with reporters. “That’s just personal preference.”
That preference is understandable, given McCarthy’s camp history. The grass at St. Norbert College, site of McCarthy’s 13 training camps as coach of the Packers, will be chilling (relatively) in 81-degree temps in Wisconsin on Friday.
“But really, the weather and those types of things will factor into it,” McCarthy continued. “We’re prepared to go outside every morning. That’s the plan. But I’m sure there will be days or a day or two that we may come inside the Ford Center. It’s very beneficial to have that flexibility, but my goal is to be on the grass as much as we can to start camp.”
Besides, McCarthy didn’t add, the Ford Center is being repurposed as the team’s meeting room.
The 12,000-seat indoor stadium and practice field is holding considerably fewer occupants after its recent alterations. Seats- and even entire rows- have been blocked off to keep players safely spread out during coaches’ presentations and sit-down sessions. The gorgeous movie theater normally used for such meetings simply doesn’t allow for social distancing.
For smaller breakout groups, the team can split and scatter.
“When the team breaks into units,” writes The Dallas Morning News‘s David Moore, “the defense goes to the northwest concourse to meet, and the offense takes the southwest corner near Tostitos Plaza.”
Meeting areas in stairwells and hallways. A thinned-out weight room. Reduced seating in the dining hall. Many areas of The Star have had to undergo a COVID-era redecorating. It’s awfully nice to have a 91-acre campus to work with.
The sprawling size of the team’s headquarters actually gives Dallas multiple options on how to reconfigure things, a luxury that few other organizations have. Take, for example, the clear Plexiglas dividers between the lockers.
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“The Cowboys have more locker room space than most clubs,” Moore points out. “The main locker room houses 78 players. There’s a back room, normally reserved for rookies in camp, that has an additional 27 lockers. There are another two rooms with a total of 100 lockers at the adjacent Ford Center for high school football. There are at least two other auxiliary rooms that can be used for additional lockers or to store and sanitize equipment between practices.”
According to Moore, “the team could have set aside two empty lockers between every occupied space and made it work.”
Locker partitions means the chess board Amari Cooper leaves up for his matches with Chidobe Awuzie will stay put away for this season. In fact, should any two players get too close to one another, their contact trackers will issue a warning.
“A flashing red light comes on if you get too close,” rookie center Tyler Biadasz said.
The Kinexon trackers, picked up by the players each morning to be worn either on the wrist or attached to a belt loop, monitor players’ movements as they move throughout the facility. They’re set to go off if two of them are within six feet for more than a few seconds. The devices are left at The Star overnight, to be charged and sanitized in preparation for the next day.
In fact, many of the efforts meant to maximize players’ safety happen away from the team’s view. Two different vendors do a daily deep clean of the building. The entire HVAC system has been outfitted with air purification and ionization filters. Special washing machines even treat the laundry generated by the team- 700 pounds per day- so that the jerseys and towels themselves continuously kill germs and prevent their own re-contamination.
Players, coaches, and staff have their own high-tech routine each day. To gain access to the facility, every individual must go through a touchless scanner. Facial recognition programs not only verify the person’s identity, but also take their temperature.
And the actual COVID testing is a completely separate process. Thermal scans. Nasal swabs. A litany of screening questions to be answered. Want the antibody test? There’s a blood draw required for that.
But there’s only so much the next-gen precautions and extra protocols can do. It’s still football, a sport that requires a lot of close-up physical contact of large groups. And not every safety measure available is being adopted quite so readily.
At least one equipment manufacturer is testing a shield that would be worn inside the facemask, meant to block respiratory droplets expelled into the air. It has not met with wide acceptance; Cowboys linebacker Leighton Vander Esch is one of the skeptics.
“I need to breathe when I’m playing,” Vander Esch said, per Calvin Watkins of The Dallas Morning News. “And it’s one thing to have an eye shield on, but to have that other part on your helmet, some guys can wear it … but I’m probably not going to do it. We’re sweating, we’re hitting, and doing all that. I don’t think we’re going to get around it just by wearing a little shield on our chin.”
For now, Vander Esch and the rest of his teammates are already jumping through a considerable number of new hoops just to get ready to play football in 2020.
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