Camp staffers as busy as Bengals

[Ox]

Camp staffers as busy as Bengals

By JEFF KERR

8/3/07

To most people who visit the Cincinnati Bengals training camp at the Georgetown College Athletic Complex, the show is on the field.

It could be argued, though, that the real show takes place behind the scenes where the people who make the camp go work.

They feed the players, make sure they have comfortable housing and make sure the practice field is safe. They even give up their offices.

This is their story.

'Lean, mean and healthy'

It's no wonder National Football League teams don't draft teenagers.

They probably figured they couldn't stand their belly-aching about their bellies.

"No junk food. No hot dogs. No pizza," said Jessica Greathouse, catering director of Made From Scratch catering. "We keep it lean, mean and healthy."

Greathouse and her mother Claudia Costello, owner of Made From Scratch, have been feeding the Cincinnati Bengals at their training camp at Georgetown College for the past six summers.

And it's more than a full-time job, feeding 140 people a meal, four meals a day.

"Mom comes in at 5:30 and stays until about 3, and I come in between 1 and 1:30 and stay from 11:30 to midnight, so we overlap a little bit," Greathouse said. "We're the only two that work shifts that long. We have about six different shifts for the rest of the workers so nobody gets too tired."

They feed the Bengals breakfast, lunch, dinner and an evening snack. And the menus are carefully controlled.

"Breakfast is from 6 to 8 and is your run-of-the-mill breakfast," Greathouse said. "Eggs and bacon, turkey bacon and sausage, grits, oatmeal, cereal, scones, pancakes and smoothie bars."

Lunch, from 11:30 to 1:30, depends on the Bengals' practice schedule for the afternoon, she said.

"If they have a tough practice scheduled, they get a light lunch," she said. "Grilled chicken and pasta, sea scallops, beef tenderloin tips and noodles, rotisserie chicken, baked salmon, meat loaf and lots of vegetables. And we have a huge salad bar. It's 16-feet square."

Dinner is from 6 to 8 and is the big meal as the Bengals refuel after that day's practice and get ready for the next day's, she said.

"Dinner is a little bit heavier. It's usually a 16-ounce steak or Mediterranean encrusted tilapia. We give them a lot of steak to give them a lot of protein. We also have pork tenderloin and applewood pork chops, pot roast and salmon."

You might think that three meals like that a day could keep these gridiron giants satisfied, but Made From Scratch adds an evening snack meal which begins at 9:30 p.m.

But it's probably not your idea of snacks.

"For snacks, we serve hamburgers, catfish strips, burritos, prime rib sandwiches and jelly bars," Greathouse said.

While junk food like hot dogs and pizza is out unless the Bengals head downtown, they do get some ice cream if they want it.

"But it's fat-free and sugar-free," Greathouse said. "We're very health-conscious about what we serve them."

Four meals a day for 140 people for three weeks means shopping someplace else other the grocery store, Greathouse said.

"It's a lot of food," she said. "We get half a tractor-trailer load either every day or every other day."

But it must be good food. "We get compliments all the time," Greathouse said. "They're very appreciative of what we do."

Over the years, she said, she and her mother have come to know several Bengals.

"Just a few," she laughed. "But you know, they know we're here to do our job and they're here to do their job."

That doesn't stop them from following the team.

"We definitely go to the games," she said. "We're huge Bengals fans."

Just regular traffic

Football practice requires a field to practice on, and preparations for the Bengals to take the field starts long before they arrive at the end of July.

"We typically start about mid-May," said Doug Bradley, head groundskeeper. "We evaluate the field and we see what kind of repairs it might need. It usually takes about 2 1/2 months to get it up and going."

The process is constant, Bradley said.

"We check the moisture level regularly and water when needed, and we mow when needed," he said. "And we fertilize once a week. Plus we check every day for low spots and see if there are any seams that need to be repaired."

Contrary to what you might think, National Football League players aren't any harder on the field than college or high school players.

"It's all just regular football traffic," Bradley said. "Nobody's harder on it or better on it than anybody else. But the Bengals do a good job of using all the field on an as-needed basis."

Bradley said his department's proximity to the Bengals hasn't bred much familiarity with the players.

"Not really," he said. "We're so busy working on the field we tend to keep to our own business."

Blocking the view

Stacey Varney and two of her colleagues get rooted out when the Bengals arrive.

Varney, executive director of the Thomas and King Leadership and Conference Center, and two others vacate their offices when the Bengals camp begins.

"We move our offices to a storage closet," she laughed. "It's pretty cool. There's three of us in there with our desks and computers and everything."

While the conference center is busy year-round, the pace picks up when the Bengals come to town.

"Definitely," Varney said. "The first thing we do is our interns put tin foil on all the windows. The Bengals use the rooms to watch films. The rooms are divided by the team's positions, and maintenance even has to build a temporary wall in one room to divide it even further."

Feeding the Bengals in the center isn't much of a reach, she said.

"We don't do anything special there," she said. "We're already set up as a banquet facility, and Made From Scratch is our regular caterer anyway."

But she does have some additional duties in other areas when training camp begins.

As the camp's co-director, Varney said one of her jobs is to go to every apartment and then make a report to building services and maintenance.

"Then they go in and fix and clean and do all that good stuff," she said.

Although things can get a little frantic sometimes during the camp, Varney says it does come with one nice perk.

"We get to eat the same good food the players do," she said. "But we have to go through the line last."

Feel at home

For Rick Carter, manager of building services, making the players feel at home is his job.

"They're housed in the East Campus apartments," he said. "The apartments are four bedrooms with two baths, a kitchen and living room. They're completely furnished and carpeted."

There are four apartment buildings in the complex, Carter said, each with eight apartments. And by the time the players arrive, he said, they look like new.

"First they go through a deep-cleaning process," he said. "Then if there's any painting to do, we do that. We clean the windows, the blinds, the whole nine yards. The only thing we don't do is clean the rooms during the camp. We contract with a Lexington company for that."

That detail continues to the locker rooms the players use.

"This year we've put in new carpet and new tile in the locker rooms," he said. "We want to make sure they're as comfortable and as happy as they can be."

It takes a lot of people to accomplish that, he added.

"I've got 23 people on my staff, and there's probably about 50 people total involved in getting things ready," he said.

'Could never afford'

One person intimately involved with getting things ready for training camp is Eric Ward, athletics director at Georgetown College.

Ward is co-director of the camp with Varney and that task takes up a lot of time, he said.

"We coordinate and manage the whole process. And we work on it all year round," he said. "It's not something you put in a drawer and forget for a few months. It's an ongoing process. But the time commitment really starts to increase after Memorial Day."

Although many people in Georgetown are used to the hoopla surrounding the Bengals being in town each summer for the past 11 years, Ward said it's hard to realize just how positive their presence is for the community and the college.

"Put it this way," he said. "There are 32 NFL teams. But not all of them travel to camp. I would estimate about half do, and the other half train at their home facility.

"Let's say there are 16 to 20 teams that do travel. That means we are one of the 16 to 20 to host an NFL training camp."

And that, he said, translates into more people hearing about Georgetown than usually would.

"Our college and our community get a lot of national publicity," he said. "We get a lot of people exposed to our small campus. There are about 53,000 people who come to the camp each year. That's 53,000 visitors to our campus."

Last year, Sports Illustrated wrote an article on Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer and included a photo of the training camp, Ward said.

"We're also in a lot of newspapers and on a lot of television," he said. "That's the kind of advertising and promotion we could never afford to buy. It's an opportunity for exposure we'd never have without it. We're a student-based college and we rely on our students. This helps us build a national profile."

http://www.georgetownnews.com/articles/200...news/news01.txt

[HoosierCat]

They feed the Bengals breakfast, lunch, dinner and an evening snack. And the menus are carefully controlled.

"Breakfast is from 6 to 8 and is your run-of-the-mill breakfast," Greathouse said. "Eggs and bacon, turkey bacon and sausage, grits, oatmeal, cereal, scones, pancakes and smoothie bars."

Lunch, from 11:30 to 1:30, depends on the Bengals' practice schedule for the afternoon, she said.

"If they have a tough practice scheduled, they get a light lunch," she said. "Grilled chicken and pasta, sea scallops, beef tenderloin tips and noodles, rotisserie chicken, baked salmon, meat loaf and lots of vegetables. And we have a huge salad bar. It's 16-feet square."

Dinner is from 6 to 8 and is the big meal as the Bengals refuel after that day's practice and get ready for the next day's, she said.

"Dinner is a little bit heavier. It's usually a 16-ounce steak or Mediterranean encrusted tilapia. We give them a lot of steak to give them a lot of protein. We also have pork tenderloin and applewood pork chops, pot roast and salmon."

The Bengals have come a long way from the box lunch days, eh?

[BengalChamps]

Interesting article.

What is the BengalBudget for TC? Sounds like alot.

[BengalszoneBilly]

Interesting article.

What is the BengalBudget for TC? Sounds like alot.

I think those two Kentucky girls are making BANK off of Training Camp, and taking the rest of the year off!

[redsbengalsbucks]

Interesting article.

What is the BengalBudget for TC? Sounds like alot.

I think those two Kentucky girls are making BANK off of Training Camp, and taking the rest of the year off!

Sounds like a great plan, if only they got season tickets for free too!

[BengalszoneBilly]

Interesting article.

What is the BengalBudget for TC? Sounds like alot.

I think those two Kentucky girls are making BANK off of Training Camp, and taking the rest of the year off!

Sounds like a great plan, if only they got season tickets for free too!

I'm betting they're getting hooked up there too RBB!