Moving Day in Buffalo

Moving Day in BuffaloPITTSFORD, N.Y. -- The section bosses watch with a mix of amusement and resignation as the annual late-summer scramble begins in earnest. Two dozen interns descend on some of moving trucks parked back to back with athletic tape spilling out and the doors flung shoulder pads, t shirts and open. Here is the official end. School juniors and seniors hailing from areas like Pullman, Wash. and State College, Pa. are still wearing their school's gear as they haul. Their Buffalo Bills apparel is in those boxes being handed down by tattooed movers on the campus of St. John Fisher College. "I actually don't know how we would do this without them," says an assistant athletic trainer. The haul comprises 300 footballs (a wet practice day can render up to 40 balls unusable by quarterback standards), 18 different types of facemasks, 260 terabytes of video information, 2,000 rolls of fit tape and about 22,000 pounds worth of weight room equipment (the equivalent of two African elephants). Cook Moving Systems workers work 12-hour days and load about 170,000 pounds of gear up among 18 truckloads headed for suburban Rochester. In 2013, only 14 NFL teams will pack their team facility up and move into a resort or little school campus. It's a dying art; in 2000, camp was held by only five teams at home. Teams ceased moving for many reasons, most often convenience. As franchises spent more and more cash building and refining state-of-the-art training facilities, and coaches fell out of love with that sleepaway-camp-team-bonding thing, the Bills and others fell into the minority. And how do coaches do it? The search for motives yields plenty of opinions, perhaps none more salient than that of general manager Doug Whaley, who inherited the tradition but believes in it all the same. The key, Whaley says, is to make players uneasy. "This game is about distractions, and dealing with distractions," Whaley says. "I think one of the really essential things about getting away to camp is to see what it is like for a player and how he responds when he is uncomfortable. When he's in a dorm room, when he https://www.cheapbuyblazer.com/buy-cheap-air-jordan-5-v-retro-womens-silver-shy- Cheap Nike Air Jordan New Sytle.ink-stealth.html.is away from home, when it is all football. "Do you push through it trying to get better? Or would you tap out?" The second reason, possibly the one most frequently cited among Bills employees, is money. The Bills estimate 18% percentage of season-ticket revenues come in the Rochester area. With the possibility of a new ownership group and the franchise having missed the playoffs since 1999 (the longest streak in NFL), the Bills can't afford to ignore mature regional markets. "It can be a pain, transferring everything," says equipment manager Jeff Mazurek, "but you see the reason behind it. Everything goes. That is the way it's been for several years, and especially this season, with the Bills preparing for a five-game preseason and the most early training camp beginning in the NFL. That means just about everything from the equipment room to the trainers' offices will be mounted onto dollies, loaded into large moving trucks that are white and re-assembled 80 minutes northeast. The process becomes a spring cleaning of forms, with long-lost equipment reconsidered for the draw and being pulled from cabinets. And that is how I found it: The holy grail of NFL memorabilia that are obscure. Any seasoned office mover will tell you: The ideal time is transferring day. I start at Ralph Wilson Stadium, where I navigate past construction workers welding support beams, husky interns half-jogging to and from and. And there they are: It was an one-year stint on the back end of the wide receiver 's tremendous and, similar webpage.occasionally, riotous profession, but the Bills kept over a dozen pairs. "That sort of stuff," explains Mazurek, "we keep merely because it is trendy. And sometimes the players need to wear them for exercise. For the novelty." Mazurek's equipment rooms, nestled deep inside Ralph Wilson Stadium, are the first to be emptied. For the first time all summer, he must bypass his morning routine of loading 4-year-old twins and a 2-year old son into his SUV and picking up coffee and donut holes. During the 10 a.m. drive to camp, his wife calls to let him understand his son woke up shouting and hollering "Daddy!" at 7 a.m. "His wife attempted to let them understand I wouldn't be there starting today," he says. "They likely will not even recognize I'm gone by the end of the day." He grew up outside of Buffalo. In 1994 his father and he attended Super Bowl XXVIII in Atlanta, the last of the Bills' four consecutive Super Bowl losses. Mazurek interned in the summer of '97, and got a job with the team shortly afterward. When the team's equipment manager was fired in 2012 (Dave Hojnowski is suing the team, alleging age discrimination), Mazurek was elevated to equipment czar, placing him in charge of outfitting 90 players (with a continuous eye on the weather) and 80 team employees. He's a passion for pushing the envelope when it comes to trend, sometimes bringing rebuke from the uniform conformity observers of the NFL. For example, helmet visors featuring team emblems are a no no, even. "Part of the fun is pushing what you can and can't do, so long as it is trendy with Coach," he says. "It's about pushing the brand. You want the players to be proud to wear the emblem." The job, like the move, has its hassles. Last year Nike sent over 50 boxes of new apparel on moving day. Apparel sponsor reps' grievances are directed by they to Mazurek when their brand isn't invisible in some local news characteristic filmed in the locker room. Mazurek and a staff of three assistants and six interns do player laundry until 12:30 a.m. during camp, and awaken at 4 a.m. daily to fold three industrial dryer loads of towels. "For these six weeks you only go through it," he says. But trainer [Doug] Marrone, Doug Whaley and the ownership is so encouraging. It is top notch how they handle us. I wouldn't be doing what I do if it wasn't that manner." Mazurek arrived in Pittsford to see the first wave of interns--from equipment and athletic training, player development --help movers unload it and the first trucks arrive. Athletic training has the most interns of any department with 11. The Bills have assigned four interns to consistently water the linemen, since Korey Stringer died of heatstroke in 2001. Through 10,000 bottles of Gatorade, roughly 250 a day and 3,000 plastic bags, tape athletic trainers will use in Pittsford tear as well as the 2,000 rolls of them. Aside from coaches, no staff members spend more time with players than athletic trainers, making them among the most plugged-in workers on any team. They deal with athletes when they have been injured and at their most vulnerable, and often live with the most secrets.