Summer Heating Up for the Eagles

On mornings when you park in the Beacon St. garage on Boston College's campus, you hear them.

You hear their yelling and cheering, and the whistles and encouragement from the coaches.

You hear the football team working out, preparing for the upcoming season. | PHOTO GALLERY

You may be going to work or getting an early start to your campus visit. But the football team is already a few hours deep into their summer workouts.

Under the direction of football's head strength and conditioning coach Frank Piraino and his staff, almost all of the Eagles spend the entire summer honing their bodies for the season ahead.

"In the offseason, our goals are to make physical changes for our players," Piraino said. "Some may have to gain weight; some may have to lose weight. Some we have to address rehab issues – if guys were hurt the previous season – to take care of those injuries and get those corrected, and or address what we call pre-hab issues when there are trends of injuries. We try to prevent the injuries before the seasons starts and we gear our activities toward that."

Being a student-athlete at any Division I university involves a heavy time commitment during the year – balancing classes, practice, travel and social lives involves a lot of work.

But for the Eagles' football players, once the week-to-week physical demands of the season are past and they only have one to two classes to focus on in the summer – rather than four or five, or even six as they would from September through May – the strength and conditioning staff goes to work, laying the physical foundation for the football season.

Summer workouts are harder and more pronounced for the Eagles. But it's where much of the work for the year ahead is done.

"It's a lot more intense during the offseason because we don't have practices and we can train physically a little harder," Piraino said. "We don't have to worry about running anybody down going into a practice or a game, or over-training, as much in the offseason."

Summer is about getting ahead – both in the classroom and on the field.

"All of our scholarship players are here the whole summer," Piraino said. "All of them are enrolled in classes and we get to have them here Monday through Friday."

Taking extra classes helps the student-athletes get ahead in their degree progression, while working with Piraino's staff gets the Eagles a leg up when training camp starts in August.

"Typically, we have them in the weight room four days a week and we're on the field three days a week – plus the two hours a week or film," Piraino said.

Under recently-changed NCAA rules, on-field coaches now have the opportunity to be present during summer fitness work. On top of the ever-present goal of getting "bigger, faster, stronger," the new rules allow positional coaches the opportunity to work on position-specific fitness drills during the summer. But that's only after the foundation is laid in the early summer.

"On the field, the first half of the summer, we do one day of straight-ahead speed training and sprinting, one day of change-of-direction or agility drills and we do one day of overall conditioning," Piraino said. "In the second half of summer, as we get closer to camp, we focus a lot more on the position-specific drills with the coaches as we lead up to training camp."

The Eagles' training mirrors Boston College's summer academic calendar: four weeks right after the academic year ends, a week off for the July 4 holiday and then four more weeks. The Eagles then get a short break before head into formal training camp in early August.

Now in the second session – both in the classroom and in Piraino's syllabus – the Eagles are more focused on positional work with August looming. While many of the Eagles have similar programs inside the Yawkey Center weight room, it's out on the field where the differences are more pronounced.

"Obviously the bigger guys and the smaller guys have different needs on the field, and most of that we take care of in our conditioning," Piraino said. "We don't do too much differently in the weight room.

"In the conditioning, we have people do runs specific to their position. So the receivers run things like routes, the defensive backs do a lot of back-peddling, the (offensive) linemen do a lot of their heavy steps in place, the defensive linemen do some get-off, the linebackers so some shuffling and the quarterbacks work on drops. So things that are position-specific, mostly in running," Piraino said.

So the next time you walk by Alumni Stadium in the morning and hear noise coming from inside, know the football team is working hard to prepare for the 2016 season – one drill at a time.

Boston College Athletics

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