Chris' Job

For those of you who have been wondering about how Chris’ job is going – HE ABSOLUTELY LOVES IT! He is getting to see injuries he’s never seen before, and take care of athletes that are at such a higher level than he’s ever been around. Comments from him about the height or the strength or the speed of these athletes are commonplace. It’s practically unbelievable. I guess they’re not quite Olympic-caliber athletes, but it seems pretty close.

There is one athlete in particular that I will be keeping my eye out for – (although Chris is not all that impressed by it). Cheyenne Woods. Freshman golfer…. Wait for it…. Yes – Tiger Woods’ niece is coming to Wake Forest! I’m just hoping he’ll come to visit.

Last week, football practice officially started, and you would think that Chris had won the lottery or something. I’m sure you all know how much he loves football. He came home near giddy every night. Chris couldn’t believe that Coach Grobe actually came over and talked to him! Sure, he must be a pretty good coach if he won the Coach of the Year award two years ago, but he’s certainly not the President of the United States or anything… (Although he does make more money than one! His salary is just under a million dollars a year! That’s public knowledge found online, by the way. I’m not divulging any Wake Forest confidential secrets or anything.) As the coach of the team that Chris is taking care of, I would expect him to acknowledge his appreciation at least once. But Chris was on cloud nine that night.

On Saturday night, they held their first scrimmage, so here is a picture of Chris at one of his “offices” for the year – BB&T Field/Groves Stadium, which seats 31,500 fans. It just underwent a $1.5 million dollar refurbishing, which included the addition of the Bridger Fieldhouse and the Deacon Tower – a seven-story press box with luxury suites, as well as next generation FieldTurf and a brick façade refacing involving 89,000 specially made bricks.

My absolute favorite part of the game was watching the second through seventh string quarterbacks perfect their synchronized signal calling on the sidelines. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to do the Macarena or the YMCA, but it was hilarious! There were definitely some great shoulder shimmies, hip wiggles, and even a pirouette or two. (OK – maybe not pirouette exactly, but definitely some hopping action.)

Here’s a picture of Chris caught in action - “working.” The poor guy in the upper left is about ready to die and there’s Chris playing catch with two little kids. (To be fair, he wanted to make sure that I pointed out that this was AFTER the scrimmage was over, and that he did ultimately attend to that athlete after the trainer was done.) Everyone will be happy to note that Wake Forest won! Haha! From my professional opinion, I’d say their defense is pretty good. Offense…we’ll have to see.

Conveniently, Suzi (the other fellow - the one on the right) isn’t a big fan of football so they split up the schedule accordingly and she took a lot of soccer games. After the scrimmage though, we met up with her and her friend, Sheena, who is also from Ireland. I thought it seemed sort of cliché, but they wanted to go to Finnigan’s Wake, one of the Irish pubs in town. It was very interesting getting their perspective on the Americanized version of Irish. For example, this pub has a Sunday roast beef dinner, complete with veggies, potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding – which is completely English, not Irish. And, as Chris pointed out – Potatoes? Seriously? Have they never heard of the potato famine in Ireland?

So far, their schedules have been pretty tame. This weekend, however, really gets them going. They both have to cover the Twin City Soccer Tournament from 8am-8pm on Saturday and 8am-5pm on Sunday. They each have a high school football team that they will be covering which starts up the following week and the rest of the fall sports at Wake will be getting underway as well. I think Chris said he has 33 events to cover in the next two and a half months, not counting training rooms or clinics, of course.

Oh well, that’s why we’re here! It’s a good thing he loves it as much as he does!