Brooke Andrus
Argonauts.ca

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. -- After five days on campus with the Argonauts, I have reached the following conclusion: training camp is hard - and I don’t mean hard like racing a 1500 M, or hard like dealing with a midnight server crash when I’m on deadline at school. Those are one-time episodes that, though difficult, are usually followed by some sort of recovery period. Even my longest runs last only a little over an hour, and my hardest workouts are usually followed by a lounge session on the couch.

But training camp is different. Training camp is like a two-week marathon of workouts, meetings and sleep-deprivation. These guys are in by 7:30 a.m., and many of them are in meetings well past the time that most of us are in bed. By the end of the day, even I’m exhausted—and all I have to do at practice is stand, point a camera and shoot.

I used to think that pro athletes had it made. I mean, they play games for a living, right? But to win games, they’ve got to do a lot more than throw the ball around a bit and hit a few tackling dummies. They have to show up each day with full ‘passion buckets’, ready to perform with the speed and intensity of professional football players. This is their job, and they clearly take it seriously.

That’s not to say they don’t have a little fun too. Chuckles emanated from both the field and the sideline yesterday when Jarrett Payton, a running back, attempted a field goal in the middle of practice. He succeeded—but only after pelting the linemen’s backsides with the ball on his first attempt.

For the most part, though, these guys are all business. I remember visiting my dad at training camp the first year he was with the Tennessee Titans. As a kid, the word “camp” conjured up images of campfire s’mores and ghost stories, so I just assumed my dad was having way more fun on the Tennessee State campus than I was having at home. My brother and I thought we were pretty ‘big-time’ when we visited him. You would have thought the cafeteria was a five-star restaurant if you had seen how excited we were to be eating there.

I guess that first impression of training camp has stuck with me until now. But I’m glad that I’ve had the chance to see what it really takes to have a career in pro football. Hopefully, I’m seeing what it takes to be a winning team in pro football too.

Brooke Andrus is Head Coach Bart Andrus' daughter and is in Mississauga interning with the Argonauts' communications department during 2009 training camp. She is a photojournalism major and a track athlete at the University of Montana.