North Carolina State University Athletics
Annabelle Vaughan's Diary, Day Four
12/29/2002 12:00:00 AM | Football
Dec. 29, 2002
The players got to sleep in a little later this morning, with a call coming at 8:30 a.m. to get them up and ready for church. After attending a local church together, it was back to the hotel for meetings and taping and then on to practice around 1:00 p.m.
As always, NC State has taken over a whole section of the hotel, setting up a whole football operations center. A ballroom is transformed into a lockerroom, with every player having a specific chair containing his clothes and equipment. There is a training room, meeting rooms for players and coaches, a room for the video guys to edit, even a game room for the players.
Today's practice was a typical Chuck Amato practice - serious and fun at the same time. The players all decided to exchange jerseys today - so Philip Rivers was wearing white "82" and Jerricho Cotchery was wearing black "17." Greg Golden donned Jay Davis' black "10" and yelled that since he was wearing black, nobody could hit him all day. Josh Brown had on one of the linemen's jerseys and it really looked like he was wearing a dress.
Most of the television stations from back at home were at practice, so it was a challenge to try to identify all of the players they were shooting! Philip Rivers challenged WTVD's Drew Smith to do a drop-back drill, where they put an elastic rope around his waist and he tries to pull against it and drop back and throw. To his credit, Drew did a pretty good job after some coaching by Sean Berton.
Between speciality practice and regular practice, Coach Amato always calls the team up and talks to them. Today, snapper Danny Young came into the huddle with a white shirt with number "33" and the word "Chuck" written on it (33 was Coach Amato's number at NC State). He had also stuffed the chest area of the shirt full of something and put on a pair of white sunglasses like his coach wears. Once Coach got a load of that, he disappeared and came back out with a white shirt of his own with Danny's number "83" and the word "Young" written across it - except he stuffed the stomach so that he looked like a fat, out-of-shape lineman.
After practice, most of the media from back home met us back at the hotel for interviews. They talked to a bunch of guys, but as always their favorite was Berton, who calls himself a "quote machine."
After some more meetings, the players are free for the evening. The buses are running to a place called Tinseltown, which evidently has a bunch of movie theaters and restaurants and such. The team will practice again tomorrow and then will visit a Navy ship in the afternoon.
