Moving Day in Buffalo

The section managers watch with a combination of resignation and amusement as the annual late-summer scramble starts. Two dozen interns descend on a pair of moving trucks parked with fit tape spilling out and the doors flung shoulder pads, t shirts and open. This is the official ending. College juniors and seniors hailing from places like Pullman, Wash. and State College, Pa. are still wearing their school's equipment as they haul. "I actually do not know how we'd do this without them," says an assistant athletic trainer. The haul includes 300 footballs (a rainy exercise day can provide up to 40 balls unusable by quarterback standards), 18 distinct kinds of facemasks, 260 terabytes of video data, 2,000 rolls of fit tape and roughly 22,000 pounds worth of weight room equipment (the equivalent of two African elephants). Cook Moving Systems employees work 12-hour days and load approximately 170,000 pounds of gear up among 18 truckloads headed for suburban Rochester. This season, merely 14 NFL teams will pack up their team facility and go to little school campus or a resort for training camp. It is a dying art; in 2000, camp was held by just five teams at home. Clubs stopped going for many reasons, most often convenience. As franchises spent a growing number of cash building and refining state of the art training facilities, and trainers fell out of love with that sleepaway-camp-team-bonding matter, the Bills and others fell into the minority. And how do the coaches get it done? The search for motives affords plenty of opinions, possibly none more conspicuous than that who inherited the tradition but believes in it. The key, Whaley says, is to make players uneasy. "This game is about distractions, and dealing with distractions," he says. "I think among the extremely important things about getting away to camp would be to see what it's like for a player and how he reacts when he's uneasy. When he is in a dorm room, when he's away from home, when it's all football. "Do you push through it trying to get better? Or would you tap out?" The second reason, possibly the one most often cited among Bills workers, is money. The Bills estimate 18% percentage of season ticket sales come from the Roche Air Jordan 4 sale.ter area. With the potential of a fresh ownership group looming, and the franchise having missed the playoffs since 1999 (the longest run in NFL), the Bills can not afford to dismiss markets that are mature regional. "It is sometimes a pain, moving everything," says equipment manager Jeff Mazurek, "but you see the reason for it. We wish to reach those Rochester fans and Canadian fans, and we do a great job of it." Everything goes. That's the way it's been for a few years, and particularly this season, with the Bills preparing for a five-game preseason and the most early training camp beginning in the NFL. The procedure becomes a spring cleaning of forms, with long-forgotten gear reconsidered for the haul and being pulled from closets. And that is how I found it: The holy grail of NFL memorabilia that are obscure. You will be told by any seasoned office mover: The best time is moving day. Jeff start at Ralph Wilson Stadium, where I navigate past construction workers welding support beams, husky interns half-jogging to and from and into the visitor's locker room where the rookies made their house during minicamp. And there they're: It turned out to be an one-year stint on the back end of the wide receiver disruptive 's incredible and, sometimes career, but the Bills kept over a dozen pairs. "That kind of stuff," explains Mazurek, "we keep just because it's trendy. And occasionally the players desire 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 very first time all summer, Mazurek must skip 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 know his son woke up yelling and shouting "Daddy!" at 7 a.m. "His wife tried to let his son understand I wouldn't be there starting today," he says. "Year-old twins probably will not even realize I am gone by the close of the day." Mazurek is what you'd call a Bills lifer. Mazurek grew up outside of Buffalo in West Seneca. In 1994 he and his dad attended Super Bowl XXVIII in Atlanta, the last of the Bills' four straight Super Bowl losses. Mazurek interned in the summer of '97 as a ball boy, and got a job with the team soon afterward. When the team's equipment manager was fired in 2012 (Dave Hojnowski is suing the team, alleging age discrimination), Mazurek was elevated to gear czar, putting him in charge of outfitting 90 players (with a constant eye on the weather) and 80 team workers. He's a passion for pushing the e Http://Www.Cheapbuyblazer.Com.velope in regards to trend, sometimes bringing rebuke from the uniform conformity observers of the NFL. For instance, helmet visors featuring team logos are a no-no, even. "Part of the fun is shoving what you can and can't do, so long as it is cool with Coach," he says. "It's about pushing the brand. You need the players to be proud to wear the emblem." The occupation, like the move, has its hassles. Last year Nike sent over 50 boxes of new apparel on moving day. Attire sponsor representatives direct their criticisms to Mazurek when their brand isn't observable in some local news characteristic. "For these six weeks you just go through it," he says. "After a couple weeks https://www.cheapbuyblazer.com/discount-nike-dunk-high-044-sticky-rubber-all-noir.html.ou hit a wall. But trainer [Doug] Marrone, Doug Whaley and the ownership is so encouraging. It's top notch we are treated by them. His wife wouldn't be doing what I do if it was not that manner." Mazurek arrived in Pittsford on day one to see the first trucks arrive and the first wave of interns and gear--help movers unload it. Athletic training has the most interns of any department with 11. The Bills have assigned four interns to regularly water the linemen, ever since Korey Stringer died of heatstroke during Vikings camp 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 along with the 2,000 rolls of them. Regardless of coaches, no staff members spend more time with players than athletic trainers, making them one of the most plugged-in workers on any team. They deal with athletes when they've been injured and at their most exposed, and often live with the most secrets.