Esks to start pre-season in a hurry
Team faces early camp, two rapid-fire preseason games, then a two-week wait
Hurry. Then hurry harder.
And, no, this isn’t curling. It’s football.
It’s going to be a decidedly different Edmonton Eskimos training camp this year adding a whole different definition to ‘hurry up and wait.’
It is, by about a dozen days, the earliest opening of a training camp in Edmonton’s 70-year history.
One week after camp opens Sunday, the Eskimos will play their home pre-season game. One week.
On Sunday, May 27, the Saskatchewan Roughriders will visit Commonwealth Stadium in a 3 p.m. start.
First it’s a drag race to the first pre-season game.
Then it’s double time on to the next one. Then it’s a two-week wait to start the regular season.
Camp opens Saturday with medicals and Sunday with the first on-field sessions.
The early start to the season is part of new Commissioner Randy Ambrosie’s plan to space out the schedule and move up the start of the season. The Eskimos this year will play three regular season games in June, two of them at home.
No problem in Edmonton. There are no training camp dorms at universities where students may still be on site or any of those challenges for the Eskimos.
Nothing changes. It just starts on a different page of the calendar.
It’s just those two pre-season games. Bang. Bang.
This year, only a few hours after Randy Ambrosie holds his June 1 Chamber of Commerce Edmonton 2018 Grey Cup public ticket sale kickoff breakfast here, the Eskimos will play their second pre-season game in Winnipeg.
That’s two pre-season games in five days.
That’s Labour Day doubleheader stuff.
Throughout most years of Eskimos history, the team had about two weeks of training camp before playing their first pre-season game. And remember there used to be four pre-season games, not two. Now they’ll have completed their entire pre-season schedule within two weeks of opening training camp.
From the top down, if we overreact ... then the players will mirror our approach.
Then what do they do?
The Eskimos will then have 13 days to return to training camp to prepare for their first regular season game — back in Winnipeg!
The Eskimos are going into training camp going out of their way to play the whole daffy deal down.
“This is a league where those things happen,” said GM Brock Sunderland on Thursday of the math involved in a nine-team league. “You just adjust. And you go.
“From the top down, if we overreact, if we act like it’s going to be a huge challenge and difficult, then the players will mirror our approach. We’re definitely not going to approach it that way.
“I’ve never been part of a training camp where you play that quickly and then have the two games quickly like that and turn around and have the time off. But that’s just the way it goes. We’ll adjust.”
Indeed, the Eskimos are adjusting.
“The schedule came out after we made the decision, but it worked out perfectly that we had the entire team in Las Vegas for mini-camp,” said Sunderland.
“We were able to do our three first-day installs. I spoke to Mike Reilly here Wednesday night and felt that the way our team was, because we had the same offence and defence and a lot of the same players, it felt like we were at Week 2 of training camp already, anyway.
“We’re just going to deal with it. Instead of using it as a reason why things can’t go well, we’re just going to dig in, be prepared and play accordingly.
“We invited everybody. It’s not mandatory. Not everybody showed up.
“There were some players who didn’t come for reasons involving work, family or school obligations. But we took 72 of the 85 at the time.”
It’s a different world of sports now than it used to be when training camp was for playing yourself into shape and battling for starting spots all over the lineup almost every season.
If you’re not in shape for Saturday’s medicals, you’re probably not going to be part of proceedings Sunday.
Give or take one or two, Jason Maas could probably fill in most of the starting spots on his regular season roster right now.
“I think all teams right now have a pretty good idea of who they anticipate will be playing. We have a pretty good idea of who we have pencilled in,” said Sunderland.
Once the Eskimos get past that June 1 pre-season game in Winnipeg, the hope is they’ll totally have their team figured out and then have two weeks to concentrate on getting them ready.
“That could be beneficial for sure,” said Sunderland.
But, first things first. Hurry. Hurry harder.