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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


AEMA Report – The Second Football Season

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By Austin Perryman,
Student Equipment Manager
University of Tennessee-Chattanooga


Spring football is altogether one of the most memorable seasonal sports to be involved in as both a high school player and a FCS student manager. I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved as both.

Just before my last spring at Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, TN I hurt my back doing hang-cleans. It wasn’t much at first, but as the spring went along, my back started hurting more intensely and more often. I made it through spring practices, but not summer conditioning. I visited a doctor and decided that it wasn’t worth it. I decided to quit playing altogether because of back pain. I told our head coach Don Thomas that I was done playing after our first summer practice, but I still wanted to help the team by being a manager. A spring weightlifting injury lead me to one of the most life changing decisions I’ll ever make.

That next spring just before graduating from high school I took a big leap forward and emailed Mike Royster, the head equipment manager at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga since I was considering going to school at UTC. We eventually set up a meeting with my parents in April in his office in the equipment room. He described the day-to-day duties of his staff and offered me the next available scholarship. I was all in.

Spring football at UTC is just like it was in high school except it’s more time consuming, more organized, and a whole lot more rewarding. At UTC we report to the equipment room at 1:00 pm, set practice up at 3:00 pm, and practice close to 4:00 pm until just after 6:00 pm. Then we’re putting things up in the equipment room and cleaning it as we do every day. We’re usually finished with everything around 6:30. That totals up to 5 and a half hours dedicated to football, not to mention juggling a full load of classes throughout the day. With so much going on, I learned to organize and prioritize my time as much as possible.

Before practice the specialist position groups come out and go through their drills which consist of field goal and extra point kicking, punts, punt returns, and kickoff returns. Since our practice field is split in half (offense and defense) with one field going east to west and the other going north to south, we have plenty of room for each group to practice. My job this spring during the specialist periods was to catch punts and get the balls back to our long snapper.

After specialists practice, the entire team stretches and gets loose. During this time on the defensive field, we’re getting the takeaway circuit set up. During takeaway, defensive position groups rotate from coach to coach in timed increments. I’m with our cornerbacks coach Rod West with one other student manager, Nick Ungos. Coach West works with defensive backs on interception drills and then with linebackers and defensive linemen on pass deflections. Nick and I are responsible for retrieving the footballs and making sure Coach West always has a football ready to use at all times.

Individual drills immediately follow the takeaway circuit. My job is to stay with defensive line coaches Marcus West and Tony Brown and set up each drill they run in advance as well as help run those drills. Most of the time I either just make sure agility bags or tackling dummies are lined up or I’m acting as a make-shift running back.

Whenever Coach West or Coach Brown don’t need my help, I’m working with various other managers on putting away extra pads, hand-shields, or cones when they won’t be used again. Toward the end of practice I spot the last few periods of team drills by placing the football wherever on the field our coaches want the ball according to a practice script we get before practice starts. Each set of team drills lasts anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes depending on the day of the week or the actual drill situation.

After those team drills, practice is over and we go back to the equipment room where we unload footballs and cameras. Before leaving the equipment room, we make sure the front counter is wiped down and the floor has been vacuumed and dust mopped.

One of the noticeable differences this season than in previous years is the players practicing mat drills. Mat drills are sets of conditioning drills done on either padded wrestling mats or on field turf. Getting up at 4:30 am twice a week for five weeks to help set everything up in below freezing weather was one of the hardest things I’ve done as a manager – not to mention having a day’s worth of school work just a few hours away.

Last spring, mat drills took place during the afternoon around the same time as a normal practice, so having them start before the sun rose was the biggest change this year. Not to mention the new lights installed at our practice facility, Scrappy Moore Field, that made early morning mat drills possible. It was a favorable change because we were able to get the drills out of the way and then start our days at a decent hour.

There probably isn’t anything more disappointing to a student manager than having to miss practice because of class conflicts. Practice was on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Unfortunately I missed the beginning of practices on Mondays and Wednesdays because of a photojournalism class; however, I wasn’t the only one on our staff with class conflicts. Thanks to communication, teamwork, and planning ahead, we were able to make this spring relatively smooth with almost no unexpected turns or speed-bumps along the way.

There’s no job more rewarding than being an equipment manager. No other job out there asks you to help out a team of almost 90 guys and then their whole coaching staff with little to no praise. I’ve heard that we don’t get all the credit we deserve, and I’m fine with that. At the end of the day as long as everyone’s helmets are working properly and the balls are spotted on the correct hash on the practice field, I’m content with knowing we’ve done our jobs.






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