A Morning at a Virginia Tech Football Practice

Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech Director of Sports Nutrition Alyson Onyon (Will Stewart)

Yes, we got to see Virginia Tech practice football this morning.  I’ll talk about that later towards the end of the article.  We aren’t allowed to see the Hokies scrimmage; we just saw some positional drills and such.  Therefore, there’s not a lot to take away from the football side of things, so we’ll wait until the end of today’s article to touch on that.

I want to focus mainly on the new Student-Athlete Performance Center.  Reading about it and looking at pictures really don’t do it justice.  It’s one of those things you have to see with your own eyes, and have certain things explained to you in person, before you can fully grasp the advantages that it provides.

Because of the way today was structured for the media, I got a pretty good idea of what a typical morning is like for a Virginia Tech football player.  We arrived at the indoor facility at 8am, stood around in the cold for 15 minutes, then got escorted inside.  After a brief tour of the new weight room (I’ll talk about that later, too), we went inside and began watching practice.  After our approximately one-hour or so was finished, we were immediately escorted upstairs to the Student-Athlete Performance Center.

That’s basically the route followed by a Hokie football player in the morning.  He goes to practice, and then he goes to the Student-Athlete Performance Center for a meal.  Alyson Onyon, a former softball pitcher for Cornell, is Virginia Tech’s Director of Sports Nutrition.  As she explained, calorie intake is very important for players immediately after practice.  They just burned a lot of them for two hours on the practice field, and they need to be replaced.

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