WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W. Va. — Somewhere in the blur of advance work last week, it finally hit Russ Trainor.
That’s what we forgot.
The quiet gave it away.
The Broncos’ senior vice president for information technology couldn’t help but find a little humor in the middle of a massive project.
He and dozens of others across his department and several others were grinding away at The Greenbrier Resort before the team beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Florida and flew up for a practice week unprecedented in franchise history. They had tons of equipment from Denver already unloaded off a 48-foot truck and a lot more work to do before the first of two team charters touched down Monday at Greenbrier Valley Regional Airport.
Some prepared the practice fields and set up the giant mast cams that film Broncos practice. Two team chefs and others worked with the resort kitchen staff to set up the week. Trainor and the IT folks were in the midst of building an entire wired network on which almost everything the club did for their days here would run.
And yeah, of course, there was one thing missing.
“We were building out the network and we were busy all day Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” Trainor told The Post with a laugh. “Nobody brought a little JBL speaker. It’s a little thing. Note to self: Bring a speaker for some music next time.”
If that’s all that slips through the cracks on the most complex road trip the Broncos have ever embarked on, everybody involved will be thrilled. If the Broncos fly home Sunday night with back-to-back road wins against the Buccaneers and the New York Jets? All the better.
What went into trying to make that happen — setting up an entire football operation here for the better part of five days — came with a roughly $2 million price tag, involved hundreds of people, countless meetings, months of preparation and even the Broncos honey the team gets from hives behind the indoor practice facility back home.
“In my 31-year career, this is the biggest movement I’ve ever done,” Broncos senior vice president of operations Chip Conway told The Post even before weather impacted the club’s travel later in the week. “We had seven different team plane movements, 15 different team bus movements and 11 equipment truck movements. I think we had 39 planned meals from the time we left Tampa to the time we get back from New York.
“So it’s a heavy lift.”
The Greenbrier
Payton and the New Orleans Saints had been considering ways to escape Louisiana’s August heat when he found himself caddying for friend and PGA Tour golfer Ryan Palmer at The Greenbrier in July 2013.
Turns out the resort’s owner, now West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, was looking for an NFL team to hold training camp at the facility.
They got to talking that week. Soon, plans started to come together.
“We’d met, and he put me in his cart and drove around where it might be,” Payton recalled this week. “That was Fourth of July week (2013). Then I remember going back and talking with (Saints general manager Mickey Loomis) and pretty soon they sent some plans and then pretty soon we agreed to do a contract for three years.
“Jim and his staff, Mickey and my staff, we kind of designed it.”
The setup: Three practice fields (two grass, one turf) and a 55,000-square-foot training center. A home away from home for, eventually, several NFL teams over the years.
About a year later it was up and running. The Saints camped there from 2014 to ’16.
This is Payton’s first time back with a team since then. Not much has changed, including that this is clearly Payton’s happy place.
“It’s just how we kind of envisioned it,” Payton said. “Logistically, everything fits. The facility — really, the building is important.”
In this Aug. 15, 2016, file photo, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton walks among the players during the NFL football teams training camp at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. (AP Photo/Chris Tilley, File)
The rectangular building looks like it was designed by a football coach. It has green carpeting and not a single piece of wall decoration except for temporary signs denoting what the Broncos are using each room for. The ground floor has spacious locker rooms for the players and coaches, a weight room, training staff areas and offices.
Through the marble floor lobby and up a red staircase is a second floor full of position group and unit meeting rooms along with Payton’s office.
“(Payton) knows it very well and he loves it here,” Conway said. “He was beaming on the golf cart when we got here, driving around the grounds. He was very excited to be here.”
The Broncos knew early in the year they’d have four Eastern time zone games, so they asked the NFL before May’s schedule release if they could have two back-to-back. Once they got word that they’d play Tampa Bay in Week 3 and then the Jets, they set about looking at options. That included a pair of Florida locations: Disney Sports Complex in Orlando and IMG Academy in Clearwater.
Eventually, though, The Greenbrier won out.
“The biggest salesman on this whole thing was Sean Payton,” Conway said. “He told ownership, ‘This is going to be great for the team.’ And it is. Going around the complex (on the team’s off day), you see groups of players doing different activities, whether it’s golf or skeet shooting or going to the bowling alley. Everyone was doing something different and building that camaraderie, which I believe is the point he wanted to make here.
“He was our biggest salesman on it. When it comes down to it, there’s a cost involved in all of this, but our ownership is willing to put whatever resources that we need to get the job done.”
In the middle (of nowhere)
Draw a line from Tampa to New Jersey and this place doesn’t look too far out of the way.
Getting here is a different story.
Even an international trip like Denver’s 2022 week in London is, essentially, an out-and-back. Same if a team decides to hold training camp somewhere remote.
These 10 days, though, feature four spots on the map.
“It makes it a lot more challenging,” Conway said. “An international trip, there’s a lot of stuff that you have to do and you’re going international and customs and clearing all that — it’s a lot of bureaucratic work. But this is just managing multiple movements. When you go to London, you’ve got one plane going there and one coming back.
“… This is definitely more challenging.”
The Broncos normally travel with 26,000 pounds of gear. For this trip, they had an extra five tons to get to The Greenbrier.
The team charters on a Boeing 747 typically, but the local airport is too small to support such aircraft. So instead the Broncos used two Boeing 737s from Tampa into West Virginia, dubbed “Orange” and “Blue.” One carried the offense and the other the defense. Staff mixed in between.
“We also had a private plane from Tampa to here with some of our equipment staff, trainers and video staff to get here ahead of the truck arriving so they could set up,” Conway said.
A rainy week in Appalachia didn’t make the arrival any easier.
“We had some wrinkles — we weren’t sure about the rain and might have had to divert to Roanoke last minute,” Conway said. “But we were able to get a nice little window to land here. Not sure how well that would have gone over with everyone driving an hour and a half after we landed.”
The weather did catch up to them on the way out. Instead of two planes out, the impending rain from Hurricane Helene set to drench the area over the weekend convinced the Broncos to bus to Roanoke, Va., and take the big charter jet from there up to New Jersey.
It’s enough to make even the most organized people — folks who do logistics for a living — scratch their heads and hope for the best.
But it’s for a reason.
Payton didn’t like the way the team played on the East Coast last year and he didn’t want his team to have to go back to Denver on Sunday and then get back on the plane Friday night.
This place, in part, because he helped design it more than a decade ago, is set up for exactly this type of mission.
“Everything in one building is so rare,” Conway said. “It’s like its own NFL headquarters right here in West Virginia. You just don’t see that. So I understand now the appeal of why so many teams like to come out here. You see it more typically the West Coast teams coming back out here for the East Coast games like we’re doing.
“Now I understand the appeal. It’s very easy. It’s not easy to get to and away from, but once you’re here, it really is seamless.”
Tastes like home
Seamless and, ideally, familiar.
In fact, for the Broncos players, mealtime here tastes like home.
That’s part of the approach for Ema Thake, the team’s director of performance nutrition.
Back home, she oversees another dietitian, an intern, the team’s executive chef and the 12-person kitchen staff.
Normally for a road trip, just two people travel.
This time she had the intern along plus two chefs working with The Greenbrier’s kitchen operation.
“We shipped in food, we made some of our custom sauces from home,” Thake told The Post. “We’ve just really tried to replicate as much as we can from home here. It’s been a unique challenge, but from a team perspective the chefs here have been incredible.
“They’ve been so receptive and they’ve really worked with us.”
The goal: When players walk into the meal tent, they have all the same options they’d have back in Denver, where their plans are customized based on body composition, nutrient needs and more.
“That’s the standard we set,” Thake said. “We bring a lot of stuff with us on the road for even those really short road trips, too. They’ve kind of come to expect it.”
The meal tent at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. on Sept. 26, 2024. (Photo courtesy of Gabriel Christus/Denver Broncos)
Among the ingredient list the Broncos brought from the Front Range: 250 pounds of rice, 40 gallons of executive chef Justin Domsch’s Pomodoro sauce, 25 gallons of other homemade sauces, 23 gallons of cherry juice and 20 pounds of various dried spices.
“Our executive chef spends a lot of time and a lot of energy and we spend a lot of resources from a quality perspective on our snacks, our proteins, our vegetables,” Thake said. “… Then there’s the component of when the guys come into the meal room, they see those familiar faces. The chefs, they know how they make their sandwiches. They know how they like their eggs cooked in the morning.
“That all just helps tie in and make it really seamless.”
Strong connections
When Trainor and the IT staff arrived here Thursday, Sept. 19, they started the process of setting up an entire wired network.
This isn’t unprecedented, but it doesn’t happen often. Trainor’s been with the club 14 years and said the other times they’ve done it include two Super Bowl weeks, a week with the Minnesota Vikings and the London trip.
Every year football, like many industries, becomes more reliant on technology to operate efficiently.
The Broncos, for example, film their practices with remote-operated, mast-mounted cameras that feed directly into the team’s storage system. Gone are the days of interns perched atop towers filming and tossing tapes or SD cards down to runners below.
“We try to mirror the footprint that we have back home as close as we can for these folks,” Trainor said. “So it’s planning that out. And, to be honest with you, it gets bigger and bigger each time we do it. We have more things on the network and, so compared to when we first did the Super Bowl in New York, it’s probably double the amount of people on the network and needs.”
Trainor said the Broncos had 400-500 devices on the network when he first started working for the team. Now there are about 8,000 at Empower Field alone.
When Denver played in Super Bowl XLVIII, it set up less than 100 at the team hotel. This week, it has about four times that. Friday morning through the team’s arrival Monday, Trainor and his crew were setting up the network and connecting everything to it.
“When they get here, they’re expecting the rooms to be ready,” Trainor said. “Like, the DBs coach will beeline right to the (meeting) room and they want to get going. Time is of the essence and that’s why we’re out here early. We’re trying to save everybody time so that when they get here it feels like home as much as it can.”
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Will it pay off?
The big price tag and all of the logistical challenges are geared toward one thing: Making it easier on the players between a win against the Bucs and a chance to get back to 2-2 at the Jets on Sunday.
There’s a bonding element, too, that players have noted happens when they spend so much time together.
This is not training camp, however. This is about trying to get a win.
“You want to keep a routine as much as possible and kind of do the same things that you have been doing,” quarterback Bo Nix said Wednesday. “At the same time, you have some room to hang out with the guys. You’re not at home, so you can treat it a little bit differently. Use your routine, but also kind of ad-lib at the same time and enjoy each other’s company.
“… At the same time, rest and get ready for the game on Sunday.”
There’s an open question about whether the Broncos will return to The Greenbrier at some point.
Team president Damani Leech said earlier this summer that the plan is to hold 2025 training camp in Denver despite the team’s $175 million headquarters construction project.
“That is our goal,” he said, noting that fan attendance will be, at best, limited amid the construction.
Time will tell when the Broncos next are in need of a home away from home for more than a couple of days on U.S. soil. When they do, Conway said he’d be more interested in returning here than he thought before the trip.
“I do think that when we get back home, we’ll look back on this and this is going to have been a great experience for everyone,” he said.
Broncos plane movements Sept. 20-29
Date
Flight
Purpose
Friday, Sept. 20
Denver to Tampa
Team charter
Monday, Sept. 23
Tampa to Greenbrier Regional
Private plane with equipment, video staff
Monday, Sept. 23
Tampa to Greenbrier Regional
Offensive charter
Monday, Sept. 23
Tampa to Greenbrier Regional
Defensive charter
Friday, Sept. 27
Roanoke to Newark
Altered team charter
Sunday, Sept. 29
Newark to Denver
Team charter
(Can’t see chart in mobile? Click here.)
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