Nick Savage, head of Gators football strength and conditioning, has spent the past three months coordinating workouts in the team's indoor practice facility rather than the team's weight room inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium as shown above. (Photo: Courtney Culbreath/UAA Communications)
Season of Safety: Gators Prepared to Open Camp
Sunday, August 16, 2020 | Football, Scott Carter
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By: Scott Carter, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The sweat of the 2019 season had barely dried when Paul Silvestri began to heed the distant warning signs.
The UF football team's head athletic trainer and an associate director for the University Athletic Association Sports Health Department, Silvestri visited Disney World with his wife and kids in February, a few weeks after the Gators polished off head coach Dan Mullen's second season with a victory over Virginia in the Orange Bowl. For Silvestri, the trip provided an opportunity to relax away from the grind of the season and to catch up with his family.
However, as someone who works in the medical profession, Silvestri had monitored studies on a mysterious virus that had surfaced in news reports across the globe late in the college football season. While trips to Disney are usually to escape the realities outside the gates, Silvestri packed some precautions.
"We were hand sanitizing,'' Silvestri said. "We weren't wearing masks back then because we really didn't know. We knew there was a virus out there and with all these people, let's make sure we're doing what we can to protect our kids. Then it started to get more and more real."
Did it ever.
By mid-March, college sports across the country shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic that has dominated much of our lives the past five months. No March Madness. No spring football. No College World Series. As the majority of professional sports resumed play over the summer in various forms and under strict safety measures, college sports leaders remain divided in their approach. That has not been the case at the University of Florida, where teams from UFHealth and the UAA have worked closely using guideposts set by the Center for Disease Control and Southeastern Conference to resume activity, starting at the end of May when football players began returning to campus to undergo COVID-19 testing and pre-participation physical examinations in order to be cleared for voluntary workouts in June.
As the debate raged last week whether college football should be played in 2020 after the Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences announced their cancellation of fall football, the three remaining Power 5 conferences -- the SEC, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 – march toward the season opener. The Gators start preseason camp Monday and are scheduled to play their first game Sept. 26.
Mullen tweeted support of the SEC's commitment to continue moving forward last week as did several players in support of the #WeWantToPlay movement.
"I am so proud of our players. Their commitment to medical guidelines to stay safe has shown their resolve in preparing the right way for the season,'' Mullen tweeted. "They deserve to play this fall. They have worked so hard for this. Let's fight for them and find a way."
As the debate is played out in public, the most important factors rest behind the scenes in medical labs, at team facilities and in the ways the players spend their free time. The in-depth system the Gators put into action has produced effective results, highlighted by a month-long streak of no football players testing positive for COVID-19 or being quarantined following an initial learning curve when a string of positive tests and quarantines resulted as players adjusted to the new norm.
The transition to College Football 2020 involves a wide array of changes for the UF program, most notably the team moving its weight room from inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium to the team's indoor practice facility.
The decision came after lengthy planning sessions and a constant wave of new information as the coronavirus swept across the U.S.
Gators head football trainer Paul Silvestri is more accustomed to treating injuries he can see rather than an invisible opponent like the coronavirus. (Photo: Jay Metz/UAA Communications)
"We had multiple plans and we scrapped multiple plans. We moved the entire operation to the indoor to create an outdoor environment by rolling up the doors, and that was all vetted through UF's infectious disease [experts],'' Silvestri said. "They vetted our plan out before we even put it into play. That was a huge help there. It's a multi-faceted big-team approach. That's how we ended up where we are. Everything that we are doing is based off research."
UF's athletic trainers and medical staff, headed by Dr. Jay Clugston, have worked closely with Dr. Michael Lauzardo, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at UFHealth, and Dr. Kartik Cherabuddi, director of UFHealth's Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, in devising the UAA's plan. An additional benefit at UF that could help the season kick off is the use of pooled testing to increase the possibility of a virus-free campus once regular students return for the fall semester. Pooled testing is the ability to test multiple samples in a single vial, improving efficiency and delivering quicker test results.
By the time UF's general student population returns in full force, the Gators will have had three months of experience operating under the revamped way of life.
When players first started streaming back to campus after finishing the spring semester away, they met via the online meeting tool Zoom. While the team's locker room inside the Swamp remains closed and other locker room access is limited to prevent the gathering of players and staff in close quarters, the team has started to meet inside the Champions Club at the stadium, a setting that offers a larger space for social-distancing protocols and open doors to improve ventilation. Meanwhile, the players are required to wear masks and hand-sanitizer stations are in place in team facilities.
"In June, that was the biggest period of positives,'' Silvestri said. "That was the voluntary period, guys going here and there and doing different things."
Both Silvestri and Stacey Higgins, associate athletic director for UAA Sports Health, credit a team mentality for what success the system has produced. There have been starts, stops and plenty of good luck. And most importantly, buy-in from players, coaches and staff, from Mullen down to the equipment and nutrition personnel.
Once the reality of the highly contagious nature of the coronavirus registered with the players, Higgins noticed a change in attitude. Stacey Higgins
"One of the biggest things is the education piece going to the student-athletes and the staff, and then having them buy into the process,'' she said. "To me, that is key to what we're doing. The coaches helping reinforce appropriate behavior with masking and with physical distancing, but also reminding athletes as they leave each day about the importance of not putting themselves in social situations that put them at risk. If they didn't buy in, this would all fall apart around us."
No group of Gators has been impacted more on a daily basis by the new protocols and arrangements than the players and Nick Savage, the director of football strength and conditioning. Savage and his staff moved their headquarters to the indoor practice facility in an unprecedented arrangement.
When the first phase of the return-to-play plan was enacted in June, the majority of football players returned to campus for the additional resources and structured environment in place. It took time to adjust to the new setup but the transition is working smoothly as camp opens.
"Based on the percentage of the guys that were in that voluntary period allowed us to be a little more aggressive when they came back for the mandatory period,'' Savage said. "Really, at the end of the day this comes down to our kids are so resilient. They understand the standard of what Coach Mullen runs as a program, but they are also resilient in the real world. These guys are committed to playing football and they want to play football, so they know certain precautions are going to have to be taken, but they also know there's a great deal of work that needs to get done to be the team we want to be."
A key issue that arose this past week and attributed in part to the decisions by the Big Ten and Pac-12 is the risks involved for student-athletes who are infected by COVID-19 and the potential long-term impact on the heart, specifically a condition known as myocarditis.
According to the Mayo Clinic website, myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle that can be caused by a number of different viruses, including COVID-19. The condition can affect the heart's ability to pump blood and maintain a healthy rhythm and if left untreated, it can cause heart failure or sudden cardiac arrest.
This is another area Florida is ahead of the curve. The Gators have administered heart tests to each incoming student-athlete for several years – the practice discovered a serious defect in the heart of incoming freshman Randy Russell in 2018 – and re-tested them during their careers.
"We were really one of the first ones to discuss possible cardiac implications,'' Silvestri said. "We had discussions back in April and how we were going to address that. For all guys that come off a COVID positive, there's a full screening that we do. We have a huge advantage here at Florida because we do an extensive cardiac screen when they first get on campus and we do repeat testing their third and fifth year, so we have a lot of data on every single guy. When it comes to COVID testing, we're comparing apples to apples.
"We're also putting in another layer of cardiac testing around the 45-day window after they come back. We just want to double- and triple-check testing."
Added Higgins: "We already know how to do this,'' she said. "We do it all the time, so it's just adding in one more checkpoint. This is all across the board. This is every athlete, not just football."
In fact, Florida's soccer and volleyball teams started training camp two weeks ago. After months of operating and tweaking the system in place for football players when they began to return to campus, the system has been a success in the other sports as well.
"We've seen it on a small scale, what that looks like," Higgins said. "Now we are going to make it on a bigger scale with football. I wish I had the answers to all the questions, because believe me, the list of questions is a mile long, but I do think we have really strived to get the most pressing things answered. We want to promote health and safety – that is what our profession is all about. We do tweak it, we fine tune it, we make adjustments as need, but always, always on the side of caution and on the side of protecting our student-athletes."
In what has been a year unlike any other – and a training camp he hopes is unlike any other in the future – Savage is ready to turn up the volume as the Gators start camp toward a SEC-only schedule. He said the most difficult part of the past five months is not being able to provide the players definitive answers to their questions when they ask.
Still, he is confident they will be ready when kickoff arrives. They have adopted well to the unusual weight room and strict safety protocols.
"For the most part, one way or another, we have everything over there,'' he said. "We definitely have everything over there that we need to properly train our guys to compete for championships. As Coach Mullen says, we are operating off what we know, and what we know is that we're practicing Monday and we're playing the 26th and we're going to go compete for a national championship. I think guys have really bought into that if we're going to do it, we're going to make sure we do it better than anyone else in the country. I'm excited to see them hit the field running."
Same goes for Silvestri. The world seems to be spinning at twice the normal rate since that family trip to Disney World in February. With camp here and a potential season still on the horizon, Silvestri arrives at work with the same mindset he had as he walked around the Magic Kingdom.
"In our profession, we care about these kids. We are around them 24/7,'' he said. "I've always said two kids at home and a hundred at work. That's the way I look at it. It's hard. This is the first time that you've come across something in your career that at times you almost have a helpless feeling. It's an invisible thing. You can't wrap your ahead around it. In this case, you have to control what you can control and hope they buy in."
