Oklahoma State University Athletics
Cowboys Transform Team Hotel Into Football Facility
December 27, 2013 | Cowboy Football
Dec. 27, 2013
GRAPEVINE, Texas - The Gaylord Texan Resort is a sprawling and spectacular combination of luxurious rooms, shopping, dining and much more. It's a destination hotel for many who visit the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
It is also headquarters for the Oklahoma State football team this week as it prepares for its date with Missouri at the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic on Jan. 3.
Part of the Cowboys' bowl preparation included transforming parts of the Gaylord Texan Resort into the OSU football facility for a week.
The Cowboys have taken empty spaces within the hotel and turned them into the team's weight room, the team's training room, large meeting rooms for the squad as a whole and smaller meeting rooms for individual position groups.
Rob Glass, OSU's Director of Speed, Strength and Conditioning, said it's very important to him to maintain continuity in the team's routine in the weight room even though the Cowboys are away from home.
"We try to keep them on that same routine, that same training cycle, same reps, same exercises that they've done, whether it's on a Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday or for us here, it's going to be on a Saturday-Monday-Wednesday with the game being on a Friday," Glass said. "It enables them to be on that same routine. Mainly from a psychological standpoint, there's a lot of comfort."
Glass said the team's weight room at the Gaylord Texan Resort features eight portable racks called Flyaway Racks by Powerlift that are designed for the military. He said they fold up and can be easily transported for bowl week setup.
"We want to make it as convenient as possible for our athletes to still get their training session in while we're on the road," Glass said. "We're going to be here for an extended period of time - seven, eight days on location - so we essentially re-create our own facility in the ballroom of the hotel we're staying in. This enables the athletes to get their training session in in the morning, which is normally the way we do it during the season. We'll get three workouts in at the bowl site."
Similar to Glass, athletic trainer Scott Parker and the sports medicine staff set up a training room at the Gaylord Texan Resort for the Cowboy players to be taped before practices and to be examined if needed.
"Basically, we have to prep for everything we have (at home), but here. We don't want to leave anything behind," Parker said. "We want all of it here in case we need it. Better to be safe than sorry, so we bring all of our tapes, all of our treatment tables, all of our modalities. Everything that we have there, we set up an exact replica here."
Parker said the biggest challenge in recreating the OSU training room is the fact that it has to be recreated multiple times -at the team hotel, at the high school where the team is practicing and at AT&T Stadium.
"On a normal road game, I start packing about a week in advance and get everything loaded. This one takes about two weeks; preparing more equipment, more supplies, piecing together what I want, how I want it to get here and then where I want it set up in here," Parker said. "I came down to Dallas about a week ago to check out the facility and to see what we were going to have available, not only in the training room in the hotel, but also at the high school stadium and also at AT&T Stadium so we knew what we had available no matter where we were going."
The team arrived at the hotel on Friday and both Glass and Parker said that their respective areas are ready for use.
