Doeren: 'It's Good to be Back Out on the Field'
The NC State football team didn't have to go back to square one in its preseason preparations when it returned to the practice field for the first time in more than a week on Monday.
That doesn't mean the COVID-19 related layoff wasn't a setback for coach Dave Doeren and his Wolfpack as they hurriedly try to make up for lost time before their season opening game against Wake Forest on Sept. 19.
"We were making good progress. We had our first full contact play since spring and then you have to step away," Doeren said in a virtual news conference Wednesday. "Football is a game of repetition. You can't create the winning habits you want without repetition and you lead up to those with maxiumum reps.
"It takes maximum days for guys to get muscle memory in their fundamentals and to take an eight-day break it's a setback. It's longer than that for some guys who have been out for 14 days because of quarantine. And there isn't a fix. When you get them back, you try to do the best you can to get them acclimated."
The Wolfpack had just made the transition to full contact practices when camp was halted on Aug. 23 because of a COVID-19 outbreak among the team. The shutdown came one day after State's first scrimmage of the preseason and less than three weeks before its originally scheduled 2020 opener at Virginia Tech.
The game in Blacksburg has since been moved to Sept. 26, giving the Wolfpack a little extra time to recover from its eight-day layoff, which Doeren said felt more like a month.
But that hasn't done anything to ease the heightened sense of urgency that comes with never knowing when the next bit of adversity might be thrown the team's way.
"Unlike any other time for all of us, things change daily," Doeren said. "Day-in and day-out, the numbers change so you've got to be creative and work with the guys that are there, Zoom call the guys that aren't and hope you get through it."
Despite the obstacles, Doeren acknolwedged that "it's good to be back out on the field the last couple of days" and that his players are "chomping at the bit to get back to work."
He acknowledged, however, that the team has had to take a few steps back before it can pick up where it left off before the unscheduled break.
"We came back and the first day out we were just in our helmets," Doeren said. "Our strength staff had the guys that morning as well, so we got a good sweat in that way with them. Then we went on the field for about an hour.
"Normally this time of year your practices would be much longer than that. But you don't want to come out of an eight-day layoff and just crush it in one day. Then you've got a bunch of guys with soft tissue injuries. You have to look at it from a long-term perspective."
Doeren didn't go into specifics as to how many of his players tested positive for COVID-19 or how the virus spread through the roster, other than to say that 33 team members "live in the dorm" and that while there they had contact with others from the general student population.
That will be less of a problem now that the university has switched over to online only classes for the rest of fall semester and closed down its on campus housing.
But Doeren isn't naive enough to believe that the threat of another COVID-19 spread is gone just because his team is living and practicing in something resembling a "bubble."
"Day-to-day, you can feel like you're going to have three quarters of your guys and you end up with half of them," he said. "And then the next day they come back. It's challenging ... but as a coach I can't do anything about it. We don't get the right of veto on this one."
The good news, Doeren said, is that at least for now, the Wolfpack is getting more players back to practice than losing them to quarantine. But as the coach warns, "everything is day-to-day" from here on out.
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