As the Giants process further in this football season, having a 3-0 record, they prepare to face one of their biggest competitors yet.
IMG Academy, a Florida boarding school, is traveling all the way to Giants Stadium in this week 4 match-up. With this being the first time any Indiana team has hosted a team from Florida, it has come with some interesting aspects. In fact, preparation for a team like this is one of the biggest.
Head coach Russell Mann says that “the first preparation was to make sure there’s a right mindset.” and that the team has “been slowly working on building that mindset through the season.”
However, for the team there has been more that they’ve done to get ready for this game since it was announced last season. Mann tells us that to get ready for this game the players have been “hitting the weight room and of course having practices” but also that the coaches themselves have “come every Sunday and meet for a couple hours to prepare.”
Something equally as important as the team preparation, are the logistics that go into hosting an out-of-state team and in charge of all this is our athletic director, Heather McGowan.
For a regular game she says we need at least “55 people plus three groups of concession stand workers” and more for other areas, but for this unique game we are going to have that plus “more administration on site” due to the crowd size we’re expecting.
In addition to getting people to work the game, there’s more that had to be worked out. McGowan says that “their time of arrival, how many people they’re bringing, making sure we have enough locker space for them, or even if they have a team doctor/trainer or if we need to provide one” were some of the most challenging parts of getting it all organized. A lot of the things that went into planning this were things that we experience with every team we play but McGowan says that “the difference is we play each other all the time so communication is much easier, so a lot goes unsaid because everyone already knows.”
With all the logistics now worked out, the attention turns to the field Friday night as the Class 6A No. 1 rated Giants host the nations No. 3 rated team.
