Oregon Trainer Suspended One Month For Putting All The Players In The Hospital With His Workouts
Oregon – The University of Oregon athletic department suspended its new football strength and conditioning coach without pay for a month while issuing an apology Tuesday in the wake of the hospitalization of three Ducks football players last week.
New UO football coach Willie Taggart offered his “sincere apologies” on behalf of his coaching staff and the UO athletic department at-large to offensive linemen Doug Brenner and Sam Poutasi, and tight end Cam McCormick. As of Tuesday evening, Poutasi and McCormick remained hospitalized, in good condition, at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at Riverbend in Springfield, according to a hospital spokeswoman. Brenner was released earlier in the day.
Irele Oderinde, who had followed Taggart from South Florida, will be suspended without pay for the next month, with head UO strength and conditioning coach Jim Radcliffe returning to that role on an interim basis. Radcliffe had previously been in charge of coordinating the football program’s strength and conditioning regiment prior to Oderinde’s hiring.
…
In other news the mailman was suspended for delivering letters. The barista was suspended for making your latte. Apparently that’s what we do now. We suspend people for doing their jobs. I mean last I checked the trainer for a major division one college football team was supposed to, you know…train. Plan workouts. Push players to the limit. Find out who will sink and who will swim. Most Oregon players swam. A few sank, as their muscles fell off their arms and their kidneys slowly failed due to rhabdomyolysis.
According to a team source who witnessed the workouts, players were initially given a short warmup including push-ups, squats and sit-ups and a “plank.” Those with knowledge of the workout had described it as akin to military basic training because the repetitions were required to be performed on an up-down cadence by a supervising coach. When players could not finish the warm-up perfectly, they started over. For some workout groups, the warmup repeated for up to an hour, becoming the entire workout. Safeguards were in place, multiple sources told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Tuesday: athletic trainers were ready with water on the sideline of the workout, and players were allowed to ask out if needed.
I mean last I checked Oregon went from the national championship game not too long ago to a 4-8 season last year, with “cutting corners in the weight room” specifically mentioned as one of the issues.
In the weight room during the offseason, a large number of players, and rarely the same ones, balked at completing UO’s weightlifting workouts. One current Duck — who like all players interviewed requested anonymity in exchange for their candor — recalled teammates who finished workouts to the letter, but with much lighter weights. Another said it was common for some to mark down that they had completed all the repetitions — even though they had not done so.
At the height of summer, players left the weight room barely sweating.
“Half effort,” one player said. “Cutting corners.”
In the offseason, when NCAA rules limit how often position coaches can observe workouts, sneaking this past the powers that be wasn’t difficult. Though UO’s strength and conditioning coaches have offices in the football complex’s sparkling weight room, many keep their primary offices in the Casanova Center’s old facility where they work with other UO teams, too.
The cost of those incomplete workouts added up.
Because Oregon typically recruits leaner, speedier athletes, it often plays at a strength disadvantage — and the skipped work widened that divide as summer turned to fall.
Excuse the new guy for trying to do his job better than the previous guy and maybe create some winners out in Eugene. Hired to build lean, mean fighting machines but not TOO lean and mean because who knows how many precious snowflakes have sensitive kidneys.
