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Seems like the Rams are doing their due diligence.
Exclusive look at L.A. Rams' health protocols for 2020 training camp
Steve Wyche
NFL MEDIA REPORTER
Reggie Scott shares an inside look at safety procedures in Rams' team facility
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- With NFL teams set to start training camp on time this week, the Los Angeles Rams invited NFL Media to their facility for an exclusive visit three days before players, coaches and other staffers will begin COVID-19 testing in a trailer about 50 yards away from their headquarters.
To describe what the Rams have done to meet and surpass NFL and NFLPA requirements as a massive undertaking would be selling their preparation well short. The real work, though, hasn't really begun. "It's about education," said Reggie Scott, Rams vice president of Sports Medicine and Performance. "It's not just education by coaches, the athletic trainers and the doctors here.
It's also peer-to-peer education. It's self-policing a little bit in terms of making sure we're going to hold each other accountable and make sure that this is just not about your personal health, but it's about the health of the guy next to you."
The Rams' facility is a football-only setup, which is a significant edge over most NFL teams, whose football and business operations tend to be under one roof. The Rams' business offices are in a complex several miles away in Agoura Hills. There are fewer people -- and a smaller area of space -- to address.
Even so, coaches, players and staffers entering into the compound over the next several days will be greeted in a new way, starting with a series of health screening questions that must be passed before they'll even be admitted through the sliding security door to the parking lot. All entrants will be required to wear masks.
Once inside, parking spaces have been radically reduced because of what Scott calls a "Cirque du Soleil" tent that covers at least half of the player lot. It seriously is the size of a small-college gym. The odd part of the tent: It's just the top -- with no walls. This design allows for plenty of air flow, something that's always welcome and comfortable in Southern California and safer than having more than 100 players and coaches in tight, indoor spaces amid this pandemic.
The tent is where the Rams will hold team meetings and walkthroughs. Players also will be encouraged to eat their pre-packaged meals there so they can follow social distancing guidelines.
Monday and Tuesday, masked players, coaches and staffers will walk through the tent at pre-scheduled times and into a trailer for COVID-19 testing. Scott said they expect to administer 190 tests on the first go-round. To his knowledge, no players have suggested that they plan to opt out of playing over coronavirus concerns.
"We've been fortunate right now that I haven't had that call," Scott said.
After a nasal swab halfway up each nostril for 15 seconds, they are done. The tests will be performed by Bio Reference, which was agreed upon for all teams by the NFL and NFLPA. Results are expected within 24 hours. No testing equipment, lab work or employees have been taken away from sources that serve the general public, Scott said.
After two days of testing and one day of isolation, there will be a third round of testing on Day 4. Players who test negative three times will then take their physicals, be fitted for equipment and get set for more than a week of strength-and-conditioning training before any football activity begins. Yes, football activity.
Anyone who tests positive will then need to quarantine or, if experiencing symptoms, will receive needed medical attention. A follow-up test for a person who tests positive but who doesn't require hospitalization will be performed in an isolated drive-through space inside the team compound by the same testing company.
Much of the early days when the team gets together will be spent educating players about the science of COVID-19, Scott said. The Rams also have prepared to help players, coaches and staff with the mental stresses that may arise due to the virus and it's far-reaching impact.
"You have a variance of the way people feel about this in terms of some people don't really think much of it to where some people that are really concerned if they get it, what's going to happen to them or their family," Scott said. "We have to make sure we have resources available for the mental health aspect of it, as well. We're going to really heavily beef up those resources to make sure that we're there for them, their family members."
Before entering the actual football building, players will have to pass though a check-in table daily, clear another round of questions and then put on a contact-tracing clip, which will be placed in a wristband that they must wear everywhere in the facility and on the practice field. This will allow trainers to know where players have been and, more importantly, who they have been around while on site.
Every player also must stare into a facial recognition device that reads their temperatures, as well. If they pass everything, then it's finally into the building. There are no longer handles on doors. Just a wave of the hand in front of a reader and, voila, doors open.
What used to be a media room is now an auxiliary locker room for roughly 30 rookies. The lockers are set six feet apart and none face each other to help avoid face-to-face encounters. Hand sanitizers are everywhere. Lockers will be scrubbed and sanitized every day with aerosol disinfectants and wipes. The main locker room has been changed radically, too. The team's new logos and designs had already prompted a complete remodel, but as a result of the pandemic, lockers have been shifted around to create increased space between players.
Typically, lockers are set up by position group. Not anymore. Quarterback Jared Goff's locker has moved. More than six feet away is safety John Johnson's locker. Six feet from Johnson's is wide receiver Cooper Kupp's locker. No players who play the same position have lockers close to one another -- a strategic move to help limit potential germ and virus spread among individuals in the same position group, Scott said. It's also a part of a plan to foster a new culture for a team that two seasons ago played in the Super Bowl, but now, after failing to make the playoffs in 2019, is re-discovering itself. Team leaders requested that players interact more with players they might not be as familiar with or spend as much time with so they can get to know guys better.
Like the auxiliary locker room, the main locker room will be sanitized daily if not multiple times a day.
Spacing in the weight rooms and training rooms won't allow for much cross-interaction among players -- if they follow the rules. Scott admits this will be hard, but there will be signage everywhere reminding players about the protocols.
The two hot tubs, which typically can fit up to seven players each, will be limited to just two players apiece. Saunas are closed, turned off and bear doors with a huge "X" taped across them. The number of players allowed in ice tubs will be restricted, as well.
There are so many other precautionary measures the team is taking, such as every player having his own water bottle now, that it seems like there is little that can fall through the cracks. But Scott said he knows there are things that will happen that they haven't accounted for, and that's where preparation and the ability to adjust swiftly but thoughtfully will be incredibly important.
"The biggest thing that I've been telling everybody is you have got to have adaptive capacity," Scott said. "You can see what we knew in March about this virus to what we know today in July are two different things. This is a moving target. It's going to be critical that we're constantly keeping up with the science."
Another article from The Athletic......
https://theathletic.com/1950740/
Inside one NFL team’s plans to transform its facility
By Lindsay Jones Jul 25, 2020
For as much as the NFL has tried to create standard protocols for all 32 teams to follow as they return to work amid the coronavirus pandemic, the reality is that social distancing is going to be easier in some places than others when as many as 90 players report to training camp next week.
Some teams have massive new, state-of-the-art training facilities. Others are based inside their stadiums, which provides the benefit of space.
Other teams have had to get much more creative.
One such team is the Los Angeles Rams, who remain headquartered in a temporary practice facility on the campus of Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. (Some employees also work out of a business office in Agoura Hills.) The Rams work out of two modular buildings on a limited amount of acreage, and nearly every inch of it, from the locker rooms and weight room to patios and parking lots, has been transformed.
Rams director of football operations Sophie Harlan on Thursday afternoon guided The Athletic on a virtual tour of the facility to show the transformation and explain many of the changes players will see when they are cleared to walk through the gates.
Harlan also demonstrated some of the new technology the NFL and each of its teams will use, such as thermal scanners at the entrance to the building and inside the locker room that record and track individuals’ temperatures and proximity trackers that are to be worn by all employees at all times while on team business — from inside the weight room to the cafeteria and on the practice field — to aid in contact tracing should anyone test positive for COVID-19.
It’s been an all-consuming process for operations employees like Harlan, complicated by the fact that state and local regulations prevented most employees from being in the facility until six weeks ago, rapidly evolving public health recommendations and surges in positive COVID-19 cases across the country.
“It’s been hundreds, thousands — I can’t even begin to tell you how many contingency plans I’ve thought of. It’s been a lot of coming up with plans, scrapping them, reworking them,” Harlan said. “The amount of hours of late-night phone calls and early-morning emails, all of it, it’s constant. But at the end of the day, if it allows for us to go do this thing safely and keep not just our players and coaches and staff safe but our families as well, it’s more than worth it.”
At the Rams’ Thousand Oaks facility, players will notice several 40-foot trailers in their parking lot — home to the BioReference Laboratories testing site and 29 members of the NFL Films’ crew on-site to shoot “Hard Knocks” — and one massive tent that is 70 yards long and 44 yards wide.
That tent, with open sides and a peaked roof, will be the team’s new meeting space when head coach Sean McVay is ready to hold full-squad meetings or when his assistants want to gather offensive and defensive players or smaller position groups.
Harlan’s staff is having carpet installed over the asphalt and moving tables and chairs out of the facility’s indoor meeting rooms to create an open-air meeting space. The Rams’ plan is for team meetings to be held either outdoors or virtually. (The Rams did conserve enough parking space adjacent to the facility to account for all players; parking space for coaches and other staff members has been moved off-site, and they will take a short shuttle ride or walk.)
“That is a huge game changer for us because it creates a lot of square footage that is shaded but still outdoors, allowing for that airflow continuously but also allowing for our players to meet at some point together,” Harlan said.
SafeTags, produced by German technology company Kinexon, will provide visual and audio alerts when the wearer comes too close to anyone else. (Courtesy of Kinexon)
But first, players will have to get inside, and before they arrive, they will be asked to take a screening quiz from their mobile devices before they leave their homes or hotels. If a player reports he is symptom-free, he’ll enter a different, smaller tent. He’ll step in front of a thermal facial scanner that will take his temperature and read it out loud. The scanner will record and store these body temperatures to create a baseline for each individual, to more precisely notice a dramatic increase.
If his temperature is normal, the player will then receive his SafeTag — a chip about the size of the face of an Apple Watch — which he’ll be required to wear at all times while inside the facility, on Rams property or engaged in any team activities. These SafeTags, produced by German technology company Kinexon, will provide visual and audio alerts when the wearer comes too close to anyone else.
(For employees in Tier 3 — those people who aren’t allowed to have any contact with players or coaches or other people in Tiers 1 and 2 — it will flash yellow at 12-feet proximity and red at 10 feet, and it will give an audible alert if the 6-foot bubble is breached.)
Harlan slips the tag into a black sleeve that she pulls onto her forearm. Players will be able to wear their SafeTags similarly, like a bracelet or watch or on a lanyard around their necks. SafeTags will also be inserted into jerseys so that the teams and league can easily discover who was close to whom, and for how long, during on-field action.
Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s medical director, said the hope is these proximity trackers will make the contact tracing process far more rapid and efficient. Not only will the league and teams quickly be able to determine whom a player might have been exposed to, but they’ll also be able to know the length of the exposure — a critical component to deciding who else might need to be quarantined and for how long.
“This is an area where our knowledge is continuing to evolve and change, but clearly the CDC and other public health agencies have provided guidance here that, right now, it appears that time and proximity are really important determinants of risk of transmission when someone is infected,” Sills said in a phone interview on Friday.
The league has initially ordered 10,000 of these SafeTags, and league officials said this will be one of the largest-scale uses of this technology. The NBA is using similar technology within its bubble environment in Orlando, Fla., but on a much smaller scale.
“I learned very quickly that we’re going to have to figure this out on our own and have our own unique use case,” said Michelle McKenna, the NFL’s chief information officer. “And our protocols that we’re working on with Dr. Sills and his team are so unique that even if someone else had done it, I’m not sure it would have been done at this scale, tying it to on-site testing, and all of that together.”
The NFLPA signed off on the use of these trackers. It is important to note that these SafeTags measure proximity only to other individuals who are also wearing them; they do not record specific geo-locator or any biometric data. The data will be collected and stored by a third-party provider, IQVIA, the same company that will collect the results of COVID-19 tests.
The league did consider whether players and other team employees could wear these sorts of devices outside of the facility, but it raised too many privacy and logistical concerns.
In addition to the contact tracing, Sills said teams and the league plan to use the SafeTags and the entire SafeZone system proactively, even in the absence of an outbreak, to tell if social distancing measures are working and if there are places in team buildings where players or other employees are gathering at unsafe rates and distances.
“It’s all about risk mitigation. But I think that that type of positive feedback information can be really useful for clubs as they look for ongoing ways to diminish risk,” Sills said.
This tent will be the team’s new meeting space. (Courtesy of the Rams)
The Rams’ practice facility is composed of two buildings, both modular spaces installed at Cal Lutheran when the Rams relocated from St. Louis in 2016. Eventually, the team will build a permanent training center, but for now, players, coaches and football operations employees split their time between those two buildings, which are separated by a large covered patio.
Players will spend most of their time in and around Building 2, which is home to the locker room, weight room, training room and cafeteria. Each of those spaces will look markedly different from what players remember.
The locker room was revamped after last season, with the installation of new, swankier lockers, more open space and fresh new colors. But many of those new lockers will sit empty, and more than 30 players will instead use auxiliary locker space in a large room that used to be the media room and team communications office. Now that space is filled with individual locker stalls, spaced 6 feet apart. There are no tables for congregating for games of cards or communal dining.
Both locker rooms have coolers, which can be opened with a pedal on the bottom of the door, filled with individual bottles of water and Gatorade. Bathroom stalls also have these foot-level openers, to reduce germ transmission on hands. The Rams have installed hand sanitizer dispensers near all high-touch surfaces, such as the doors leading to the locker room and training room.
Players will also notice the signage. It’s everywhere, in blue and gold letters and symbols. There are arrows on the floors to designate one-way hallways. Doors are designated as entrances or exits only. Every room contains a reminder to MESH — the Rams’ acronym for “Mask, Education, Social Distance and Hygiene.”
Face coverings are mandatory — not just here at the Rams facility but at all 31 training sites — and education is a critical part of creating a healthy ecosystem, said Reggie Scott, the Rams’ vice president of sports medicine and performance.
Scott runs the Rams’ athletic training office and is the team’s designated Infection Control Officer. He’s also the newly elected president of the Pro Football Athletic Trainers Society. In that role, he’s been part of nearly every NFL and NFLPA task force virtual meeting since March and the early stages of the pandemic.
“I can’t wait to go back to just taping ankles again,” Scott said Friday, laughing.
His job now entails making sure that everyone in the building is following the league’s COVID-19 prevention protocols, no matter how individuals might feel about the virus and their risk. Masks are mandatory; there will be no exemptions or debates about the politics of face coverings. If they want to play football, these protocols are not optional — and they should be followed once players and staff leave the building and go home.
“Education is going to be a big component of this. We’re doing it for ourselves and our families, but we’re also doing the right thing for other people. We’ve got to respect the person next to us,” Scott said. “That’s not just a Rams thing. That’s a United States thing; that’s a world thing. We’re going to educate our staff and players that this is bigger than ourselves.”
In Scott’s space, the training room, tables have been spread far apart, and the sheets on each training table will be replaced after each use. The laundry load will increase exponentially across the league, as all items are now single-use.
Scott and his staff will have to break that 6-foot barrier at times — they have to be hands-on with injured or rehabbing athletes. Team doctors and trainers have access to a supply of medical-grade personal protective equipment, such as N95 masks and gowns, if they need it.
The team’s weight room, which is connected to the training room, is one of a few spaces that has been largely unchanged because of protocols that prohibit large groups from working out at the same time. The weight room also has garage doors that open to an outdoor gym space that the team plans to use as much as possible.
Weight and conditioning times will be carefully scheduled, just like mealtime.
Players will order their food via a mobile app and will have a designated time to pick up their individually packaged meals. The round, banquet-style tables on the patio have been removed, replaced by long, rectangular tables, making social distancing easier, and players will be encouraged to eat at their locker stalls.
This will be as big of a change as anything for players who are used to bonding with one another during training camp. After months of virtual meetings in the offseason, players will reconvene only to be told they can’t spend much actual time together.
But Rams officials are trying to remind one another, and will remind the players when they arrive next week, that there’s a purpose here: to keep them and their families safe and find a way to make it through a full season.
Now that the Rams facility is set up for training camp, Harlan is shifting some of her focus to the complications of the regular season, things she never thought she’d have to consider when she was promoted to her job of running football operations in February.
She recently toured the team’s charter plane — a tape measure in hand, to figure out seating arrangements for when the Rams take their first road trip, in Week 2, to Philadelphia — and is also working to figure out hotel arrangements and what road-trip meeting spaces will look like in 2020.
And she’s ready for everything she’s planning to completely change. After all, it was only in the past few weeks that the team received clearance from Ventura County to hold training camp at its facility in Thousand Oaks. The organization is also working with officials in Los Angeles County, home to the team’s new $5 billion stadium.
“We are prepared to take this in stride and make the changes necessary to continue, whether that’s with new technology or new recommendations from the CDC. We’ll adapt and adjust,” Harlan said.
Exclusive look at L.A. Rams' health protocols for 2020 training camp
Steve Wyche
NFL MEDIA REPORTER
Reggie Scott shares an inside look at safety procedures in Rams' team facility
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- With NFL teams set to start training camp on time this week, the Los Angeles Rams invited NFL Media to their facility for an exclusive visit three days before players, coaches and other staffers will begin COVID-19 testing in a trailer about 50 yards away from their headquarters.
To describe what the Rams have done to meet and surpass NFL and NFLPA requirements as a massive undertaking would be selling their preparation well short. The real work, though, hasn't really begun. "It's about education," said Reggie Scott, Rams vice president of Sports Medicine and Performance. "It's not just education by coaches, the athletic trainers and the doctors here.
It's also peer-to-peer education. It's self-policing a little bit in terms of making sure we're going to hold each other accountable and make sure that this is just not about your personal health, but it's about the health of the guy next to you."
The Rams' facility is a football-only setup, which is a significant edge over most NFL teams, whose football and business operations tend to be under one roof. The Rams' business offices are in a complex several miles away in Agoura Hills. There are fewer people -- and a smaller area of space -- to address.
Even so, coaches, players and staffers entering into the compound over the next several days will be greeted in a new way, starting with a series of health screening questions that must be passed before they'll even be admitted through the sliding security door to the parking lot. All entrants will be required to wear masks.
Once inside, parking spaces have been radically reduced because of what Scott calls a "Cirque du Soleil" tent that covers at least half of the player lot. It seriously is the size of a small-college gym. The odd part of the tent: It's just the top -- with no walls. This design allows for plenty of air flow, something that's always welcome and comfortable in Southern California and safer than having more than 100 players and coaches in tight, indoor spaces amid this pandemic.
The tent is where the Rams will hold team meetings and walkthroughs. Players also will be encouraged to eat their pre-packaged meals there so they can follow social distancing guidelines.
Monday and Tuesday, masked players, coaches and staffers will walk through the tent at pre-scheduled times and into a trailer for COVID-19 testing. Scott said they expect to administer 190 tests on the first go-round. To his knowledge, no players have suggested that they plan to opt out of playing over coronavirus concerns.
"We've been fortunate right now that I haven't had that call," Scott said.
After a nasal swab halfway up each nostril for 15 seconds, they are done. The tests will be performed by Bio Reference, which was agreed upon for all teams by the NFL and NFLPA. Results are expected within 24 hours. No testing equipment, lab work or employees have been taken away from sources that serve the general public, Scott said.
After two days of testing and one day of isolation, there will be a third round of testing on Day 4. Players who test negative three times will then take their physicals, be fitted for equipment and get set for more than a week of strength-and-conditioning training before any football activity begins. Yes, football activity.
Anyone who tests positive will then need to quarantine or, if experiencing symptoms, will receive needed medical attention. A follow-up test for a person who tests positive but who doesn't require hospitalization will be performed in an isolated drive-through space inside the team compound by the same testing company.
Much of the early days when the team gets together will be spent educating players about the science of COVID-19, Scott said. The Rams also have prepared to help players, coaches and staff with the mental stresses that may arise due to the virus and it's far-reaching impact.
"You have a variance of the way people feel about this in terms of some people don't really think much of it to where some people that are really concerned if they get it, what's going to happen to them or their family," Scott said. "We have to make sure we have resources available for the mental health aspect of it, as well. We're going to really heavily beef up those resources to make sure that we're there for them, their family members."
Before entering the actual football building, players will have to pass though a check-in table daily, clear another round of questions and then put on a contact-tracing clip, which will be placed in a wristband that they must wear everywhere in the facility and on the practice field. This will allow trainers to know where players have been and, more importantly, who they have been around while on site.
Every player also must stare into a facial recognition device that reads their temperatures, as well. If they pass everything, then it's finally into the building. There are no longer handles on doors. Just a wave of the hand in front of a reader and, voila, doors open.
What used to be a media room is now an auxiliary locker room for roughly 30 rookies. The lockers are set six feet apart and none face each other to help avoid face-to-face encounters. Hand sanitizers are everywhere. Lockers will be scrubbed and sanitized every day with aerosol disinfectants and wipes. The main locker room has been changed radically, too. The team's new logos and designs had already prompted a complete remodel, but as a result of the pandemic, lockers have been shifted around to create increased space between players.
Typically, lockers are set up by position group. Not anymore. Quarterback Jared Goff's locker has moved. More than six feet away is safety John Johnson's locker. Six feet from Johnson's is wide receiver Cooper Kupp's locker. No players who play the same position have lockers close to one another -- a strategic move to help limit potential germ and virus spread among individuals in the same position group, Scott said. It's also a part of a plan to foster a new culture for a team that two seasons ago played in the Super Bowl, but now, after failing to make the playoffs in 2019, is re-discovering itself. Team leaders requested that players interact more with players they might not be as familiar with or spend as much time with so they can get to know guys better.
Like the auxiliary locker room, the main locker room will be sanitized daily if not multiple times a day.
Spacing in the weight rooms and training rooms won't allow for much cross-interaction among players -- if they follow the rules. Scott admits this will be hard, but there will be signage everywhere reminding players about the protocols.
The two hot tubs, which typically can fit up to seven players each, will be limited to just two players apiece. Saunas are closed, turned off and bear doors with a huge "X" taped across them. The number of players allowed in ice tubs will be restricted, as well.
There are so many other precautionary measures the team is taking, such as every player having his own water bottle now, that it seems like there is little that can fall through the cracks. But Scott said he knows there are things that will happen that they haven't accounted for, and that's where preparation and the ability to adjust swiftly but thoughtfully will be incredibly important.
"The biggest thing that I've been telling everybody is you have got to have adaptive capacity," Scott said. "You can see what we knew in March about this virus to what we know today in July are two different things. This is a moving target. It's going to be critical that we're constantly keeping up with the science."
Another article from The Athletic......
https://theathletic.com/1950740/
Inside one NFL team’s plans to transform its facility
By Lindsay Jones Jul 25, 2020
For as much as the NFL has tried to create standard protocols for all 32 teams to follow as they return to work amid the coronavirus pandemic, the reality is that social distancing is going to be easier in some places than others when as many as 90 players report to training camp next week.
Some teams have massive new, state-of-the-art training facilities. Others are based inside their stadiums, which provides the benefit of space.
Other teams have had to get much more creative.
One such team is the Los Angeles Rams, who remain headquartered in a temporary practice facility on the campus of Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. (Some employees also work out of a business office in Agoura Hills.) The Rams work out of two modular buildings on a limited amount of acreage, and nearly every inch of it, from the locker rooms and weight room to patios and parking lots, has been transformed.
Rams director of football operations Sophie Harlan on Thursday afternoon guided The Athletic on a virtual tour of the facility to show the transformation and explain many of the changes players will see when they are cleared to walk through the gates.
Harlan also demonstrated some of the new technology the NFL and each of its teams will use, such as thermal scanners at the entrance to the building and inside the locker room that record and track individuals’ temperatures and proximity trackers that are to be worn by all employees at all times while on team business — from inside the weight room to the cafeteria and on the practice field — to aid in contact tracing should anyone test positive for COVID-19.
It’s been an all-consuming process for operations employees like Harlan, complicated by the fact that state and local regulations prevented most employees from being in the facility until six weeks ago, rapidly evolving public health recommendations and surges in positive COVID-19 cases across the country.
“It’s been hundreds, thousands — I can’t even begin to tell you how many contingency plans I’ve thought of. It’s been a lot of coming up with plans, scrapping them, reworking them,” Harlan said. “The amount of hours of late-night phone calls and early-morning emails, all of it, it’s constant. But at the end of the day, if it allows for us to go do this thing safely and keep not just our players and coaches and staff safe but our families as well, it’s more than worth it.”
At the Rams’ Thousand Oaks facility, players will notice several 40-foot trailers in their parking lot — home to the BioReference Laboratories testing site and 29 members of the NFL Films’ crew on-site to shoot “Hard Knocks” — and one massive tent that is 70 yards long and 44 yards wide.
That tent, with open sides and a peaked roof, will be the team’s new meeting space when head coach Sean McVay is ready to hold full-squad meetings or when his assistants want to gather offensive and defensive players or smaller position groups.
Harlan’s staff is having carpet installed over the asphalt and moving tables and chairs out of the facility’s indoor meeting rooms to create an open-air meeting space. The Rams’ plan is for team meetings to be held either outdoors or virtually. (The Rams did conserve enough parking space adjacent to the facility to account for all players; parking space for coaches and other staff members has been moved off-site, and they will take a short shuttle ride or walk.)
“That is a huge game changer for us because it creates a lot of square footage that is shaded but still outdoors, allowing for that airflow continuously but also allowing for our players to meet at some point together,” Harlan said.
SafeTags, produced by German technology company Kinexon, will provide visual and audio alerts when the wearer comes too close to anyone else. (Courtesy of Kinexon)
But first, players will have to get inside, and before they arrive, they will be asked to take a screening quiz from their mobile devices before they leave their homes or hotels. If a player reports he is symptom-free, he’ll enter a different, smaller tent. He’ll step in front of a thermal facial scanner that will take his temperature and read it out loud. The scanner will record and store these body temperatures to create a baseline for each individual, to more precisely notice a dramatic increase.
If his temperature is normal, the player will then receive his SafeTag — a chip about the size of the face of an Apple Watch — which he’ll be required to wear at all times while inside the facility, on Rams property or engaged in any team activities. These SafeTags, produced by German technology company Kinexon, will provide visual and audio alerts when the wearer comes too close to anyone else.
(For employees in Tier 3 — those people who aren’t allowed to have any contact with players or coaches or other people in Tiers 1 and 2 — it will flash yellow at 12-feet proximity and red at 10 feet, and it will give an audible alert if the 6-foot bubble is breached.)
Harlan slips the tag into a black sleeve that she pulls onto her forearm. Players will be able to wear their SafeTags similarly, like a bracelet or watch or on a lanyard around their necks. SafeTags will also be inserted into jerseys so that the teams and league can easily discover who was close to whom, and for how long, during on-field action.
Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s medical director, said the hope is these proximity trackers will make the contact tracing process far more rapid and efficient. Not only will the league and teams quickly be able to determine whom a player might have been exposed to, but they’ll also be able to know the length of the exposure — a critical component to deciding who else might need to be quarantined and for how long.
“This is an area where our knowledge is continuing to evolve and change, but clearly the CDC and other public health agencies have provided guidance here that, right now, it appears that time and proximity are really important determinants of risk of transmission when someone is infected,” Sills said in a phone interview on Friday.
The league has initially ordered 10,000 of these SafeTags, and league officials said this will be one of the largest-scale uses of this technology. The NBA is using similar technology within its bubble environment in Orlando, Fla., but on a much smaller scale.
“I learned very quickly that we’re going to have to figure this out on our own and have our own unique use case,” said Michelle McKenna, the NFL’s chief information officer. “And our protocols that we’re working on with Dr. Sills and his team are so unique that even if someone else had done it, I’m not sure it would have been done at this scale, tying it to on-site testing, and all of that together.”
The NFLPA signed off on the use of these trackers. It is important to note that these SafeTags measure proximity only to other individuals who are also wearing them; they do not record specific geo-locator or any biometric data. The data will be collected and stored by a third-party provider, IQVIA, the same company that will collect the results of COVID-19 tests.
The league did consider whether players and other team employees could wear these sorts of devices outside of the facility, but it raised too many privacy and logistical concerns.
In addition to the contact tracing, Sills said teams and the league plan to use the SafeTags and the entire SafeZone system proactively, even in the absence of an outbreak, to tell if social distancing measures are working and if there are places in team buildings where players or other employees are gathering at unsafe rates and distances.
“It’s all about risk mitigation. But I think that that type of positive feedback information can be really useful for clubs as they look for ongoing ways to diminish risk,” Sills said.
This tent will be the team’s new meeting space. (Courtesy of the Rams)
The Rams’ practice facility is composed of two buildings, both modular spaces installed at Cal Lutheran when the Rams relocated from St. Louis in 2016. Eventually, the team will build a permanent training center, but for now, players, coaches and football operations employees split their time between those two buildings, which are separated by a large covered patio.
Players will spend most of their time in and around Building 2, which is home to the locker room, weight room, training room and cafeteria. Each of those spaces will look markedly different from what players remember.
The locker room was revamped after last season, with the installation of new, swankier lockers, more open space and fresh new colors. But many of those new lockers will sit empty, and more than 30 players will instead use auxiliary locker space in a large room that used to be the media room and team communications office. Now that space is filled with individual locker stalls, spaced 6 feet apart. There are no tables for congregating for games of cards or communal dining.
Both locker rooms have coolers, which can be opened with a pedal on the bottom of the door, filled with individual bottles of water and Gatorade. Bathroom stalls also have these foot-level openers, to reduce germ transmission on hands. The Rams have installed hand sanitizer dispensers near all high-touch surfaces, such as the doors leading to the locker room and training room.
Players will also notice the signage. It’s everywhere, in blue and gold letters and symbols. There are arrows on the floors to designate one-way hallways. Doors are designated as entrances or exits only. Every room contains a reminder to MESH — the Rams’ acronym for “Mask, Education, Social Distance and Hygiene.”
Face coverings are mandatory — not just here at the Rams facility but at all 31 training sites — and education is a critical part of creating a healthy ecosystem, said Reggie Scott, the Rams’ vice president of sports medicine and performance.
Scott runs the Rams’ athletic training office and is the team’s designated Infection Control Officer. He’s also the newly elected president of the Pro Football Athletic Trainers Society. In that role, he’s been part of nearly every NFL and NFLPA task force virtual meeting since March and the early stages of the pandemic.
“I can’t wait to go back to just taping ankles again,” Scott said Friday, laughing.
His job now entails making sure that everyone in the building is following the league’s COVID-19 prevention protocols, no matter how individuals might feel about the virus and their risk. Masks are mandatory; there will be no exemptions or debates about the politics of face coverings. If they want to play football, these protocols are not optional — and they should be followed once players and staff leave the building and go home.
“Education is going to be a big component of this. We’re doing it for ourselves and our families, but we’re also doing the right thing for other people. We’ve got to respect the person next to us,” Scott said. “That’s not just a Rams thing. That’s a United States thing; that’s a world thing. We’re going to educate our staff and players that this is bigger than ourselves.”
In Scott’s space, the training room, tables have been spread far apart, and the sheets on each training table will be replaced after each use. The laundry load will increase exponentially across the league, as all items are now single-use.
Scott and his staff will have to break that 6-foot barrier at times — they have to be hands-on with injured or rehabbing athletes. Team doctors and trainers have access to a supply of medical-grade personal protective equipment, such as N95 masks and gowns, if they need it.
The team’s weight room, which is connected to the training room, is one of a few spaces that has been largely unchanged because of protocols that prohibit large groups from working out at the same time. The weight room also has garage doors that open to an outdoor gym space that the team plans to use as much as possible.
Weight and conditioning times will be carefully scheduled, just like mealtime.
Players will order their food via a mobile app and will have a designated time to pick up their individually packaged meals. The round, banquet-style tables on the patio have been removed, replaced by long, rectangular tables, making social distancing easier, and players will be encouraged to eat at their locker stalls.
This will be as big of a change as anything for players who are used to bonding with one another during training camp. After months of virtual meetings in the offseason, players will reconvene only to be told they can’t spend much actual time together.
But Rams officials are trying to remind one another, and will remind the players when they arrive next week, that there’s a purpose here: to keep them and their families safe and find a way to make it through a full season.
Now that the Rams facility is set up for training camp, Harlan is shifting some of her focus to the complications of the regular season, things she never thought she’d have to consider when she was promoted to her job of running football operations in February.
She recently toured the team’s charter plane — a tape measure in hand, to figure out seating arrangements for when the Rams take their first road trip, in Week 2, to Philadelphia — and is also working to figure out hotel arrangements and what road-trip meeting spaces will look like in 2020.
And she’s ready for everything she’s planning to completely change. After all, it was only in the past few weeks that the team received clearance from Ventura County to hold training camp at its facility in Thousand Oaks. The organization is also working with officials in Los Angeles County, home to the team’s new $5 billion stadium.
“We are prepared to take this in stride and make the changes necessary to continue, whether that’s with new technology or new recommendations from the CDC. We’ll adapt and adjust,” Harlan said.
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