When the Guelph Gryphons reported to town for their first OUA football training camp under first-year head coach Mark Surya, they were greeted with a whole new format for the camp.
Gone were the morning four-hour on-field sessions and the team didn’t revert back to the two-a-days, one in the morning, one in the late afternoon, that were the norm 15 to 20 years ago.
On-field activities were cut to a single, three-hour afternoon session each day.
“It’s to promote the health and well-being of the student athletes,” Surya said. “We're trying to make it so that they have a successful training camp, and what I mean by that is we talk so much about the No. 1 thing players can do is get a proper eight hours of sleep or nutrition or all that stuff.”
The on-field sessions also take place at the time of day when the Gryphons would usually play their games. In past, the theory was to avoid the heat of the day for the on-field training camp activities, but then they had to play their league games in it and were often not ready for it.
“Yes, we're practicing during when we're going to be playing games. That's positive,” Surya said. “We're not getting them up at 6 a.m. to get taped and ready for practice so they should be able to get eight hours of sleep. And then they're going to get a meal before and after practice to decrease the amount of weight loss. Obviously it's heavy days, so nutrition and all that stuff. We're trying to make sure that they get taken care of. “The changes are brand new for everybody. I don't have something to go off where I can see it's been successful, but I really believe in making sure they get eight hours of sleep or as much sleep as they can and eating before practice. That's why we made the change.”
For Surya, getting the team on the field put an end to months of planning for the season as he was named Ryan Sheahan’s replacement last December after Sheahan left to be head coach of the University of Calgary Dinos. He had been Sheahan’s offensive coordinator.
“It's good because I've spent so much time worrying about all the different things just to get everybody settled,” Surya said. “We’ve had a few changes this year – a much larger staff and a much larger staff involves more planning and more discussion about how practice should go and all those things. So the fact that it's finally here, you're excited to get going to see the fruits of your labour. For a long time we were just sitting in rooms, planning and Excel sheets and all those things so the fact that it's here, you're able to go out and just do what you love and it's a little bit easier on the day-to-day because you understand what's coming.”
One thing that always happens at training camp is getting the first-year players comfortable with their surroundings and giving veteran players more responsibilities.
“That’s always the fun part, to see the guys interact and create relationships and to see the coaches interact and create relationships,” Surya said. “Culture is really easy to talk about, but it's really hard to execute because there is no one method for creating a really cohesive team that cares about each other. So you can put the environment in place for those types of relationships to thrive, but you never know what it looks like until those days actually come.”
Growing as a team should also mean growing as individuals. Not only should the team’s goal to produce good football players, it should also be striving to produce good human beings.
“Personal accolades and all that stuff needs to be put to the backburner, especially when you have a really talented team. So when you're talented, there's going to be players that would likely be stars or starters somewhere else and you're asking people to take maybe a secondary role because it's what's best for the group. So whenever you see those things, I think when the environment is positive and people enjoy being there, and there's more than just I'm here to play and try to make the league or get stats, then you'll see anybody's willing to sacrifice whatever it takes. My experience has been in negative environments or cultures where those things don't thrive, the team aspect doesn't thrive, and then that's when people inherently get selfish. Really trying to promote the right things all the time has been our goal.”
Two things stand out with a quick glance at this year’s schedule for the Gryphons. Their travelling is pretty negligible and they get their bye on the final week of the regular season.
With the exception of a Sept. 21 game in Kingston against the Queen’s Gaels, the travel time to each of their other three road games is an hour or less, depending on traffic. They’re to play the Varsity Blues in Toronto the night of Sept. 1, the Sunday of the Labour Day weekend, the Laurier Golden Hawks at Waterloo Sept. 7 and the York Lions in Toronto Oct. 11.
And Surya isn’t sure if the bye on the final week of the regular season will be a good thing or a bad thing.
“I guess we'll find out at the end of the year,” he said. “If we're going into the bye (and we’re going to be in) the playoffs and we're going to get healthy and all those things, it's really positive. But if it was last year, we'd be going to the last-week bye and that would be the end of the season. It's too hard to say right now whether it's positive or negative. It has the potential to be both depending on how the season goes.
“We're just going to take it game by game and see what happens when we get to the end of it. It does put a little bit more of an emphasis on the season because you don't have that mid-season breather. But we're really lucky on the travel schedule and so things are stacking up in our place and I think it can be a really, really positive, big positive for us if we're able to accomplish some of our goals for the season.”
The Gryphons are to begin their season Saturday with a 1 p.m. game at Alumni Stadium against the Carleton Ravens.
Their other home games, all 1 p.m. starts, are against the McMaster Marauders Sept. 14, Waterloo Warriors Sept. 28 in their Homecoming Game and Windsor Lancers Oct. 5 in their Seniors Game.
Guelph does not play Western in the regular season.
Playoffs start Oct. 26.
