The New York Giants might end up playing their home games behind closed doors this NFL season, but the team hasn’t let the coronavirus pandemic stop their activities as a whole. They’re still set to begin training camp towards the end of the month, and the team has plans in place to avoid furthering the spread of the disease.
That will include some strategies that are a little bit unconventional. Ever since the offseason started, there’s been a question of how distancing can be handled in locker rooms that are by nature tight together. NFL teams have a lot of personnel, after all, and the usual practice is to pack players close together to fit the entire team into one room.
That’s not possible because of the current pandemic, but the Giants do have an alternative.
MetLife Stadium to use some of its space for training camp
According to the New York Post, the team is planning to help the space problem by using some of the facilities at MetLife Stadium. Unlike some other NFL teams who have their training camps at separate locations, the Giants hold their camp right next door to their actual stadium.
Because of this, they have more overall space to work with as a team and the extra locker rooms in the facility such as the visitors locker room and ones used for the XFL can be of use to the Giants. With more lockers available, the need to have players packed tightly together during the locker room goes away somewhat.
The team also intends to hold meetings at the stadium while the Quest Diagnostics Training Center will just be used for its fields.
Of course, there’s no guarantee still that training camp will go smoothly without problems. It’s the first time of the year when players will train together on the field and skipping the contact parts of it pretty much aren’t possible
Just because of the physical nature of the game, players will have to push and shove against each other and get sweat on each other, so it remains to be seen whether or not the social distancing plans will work at all.
If it doesn’t, and players around the league start coming down with the virus, we might not see any 2020 season at all.