The New York Giants have some major challenges this offseason – like the rest of the league, the team is currently unable to practice as it normally would during the offseason because of local shutdowns affecting the team’s training facilities and the league’s plans in general for offseason activities. While a lot of the conversation right now would, in a normal year, be about which players are going to win in offseason position battles going into training camp later in the summer, it’s more common to question now whether that training camp will happen at all.
The team, of course, hasn’t stopped training for the season completely just because of this less than ideal situation. The Giants, like the rest of the NFL, have relied on a virtual program to get through the offseason to this point. What exactly goes into working with the players within the framework of that kind of program?
Sam Coad, assistant strength and conditioning coach and performance manager, spoke to American Football International about that.
“It really now comes down to the individuals and trying to communicate and work with them to say ‘is there something going on here, are you struggling with something, what do you need in your situation?’ When you’re dealing with high-performing athletes worth millions to a club, and they’re saying they can’t do X, you’ve gotta have a plan to get them on track,” Coad, an Australian, stated. “The psychological side of things is more complex than what you get from a textbook.”
“Every industry coming out of this is going to struggle because you can’t take the world, give it two months off, then expect to go back to how it was,” Coad also stated. The staff of the Giants are, of course, among those who are currently unable to work – as of now, the Giants still aren’t in a position where the staff can have contact with the players.
The offseason hasn’t been entirely cancelled yet. The team has discussed, after all, the possibility of moving training camp to a location less impacted by closures. But that hasn’t happened just yet, and for everyone on the Giants staff right now, the virtual program is the current reality of the job.