Strung Along by Gimpy Hamstrings
The first word I heard at Tuesday’s gathering to eat chicken and talk football was that Chris Givens had torn his hamstring in Monday’s practice. The report turned out to be inaccurate.
Givens did irritate an already sore hamstring, but he was back in practice Tuesday and Wednesday and is expected to play Saturday in the ACC showdown at Clemson.
That’s one thing we all have to be careful about in this day of universal information flying all over space, not to overreact to the first word we hear. Had I knocked out a blog to the effect Givens was seriously hurt, I would have caused all kinds of uproar. And I would have been wrong. It’s my job as a journalist to verify information before I pass it along.
But as I’m waiting for practice to begin to check with trainer Don Steelman about Givens’ condition, I start formulating what I would write if the report had turned out to be true. My catchy lead would have been something to the effect that instead of saying the Deacons have been snakebitten this season, hamstrung would be a better description. Michael Campanaro missed a game earlier with a sore hamstring, Josh Harris is still limping on his and as of Wednesday was doing very little in practice. And now Givens is sore again after nursing his hamstring during preseason camp.
A number of you readers have wondered if the Wake training staff is doing all it can to prevent hamstring injuries. The subject came up when we finished off the chicken and started talking football with Jim Grobe.
“Typically it’s guys that do the most running, are the guys who are more susceptible to hamstring,’’ Grobe said. “But everybody’s got them. It’s each individual player.
“There’s no set time to come back. There’s no set treatment, that one treatment’s better than another. We call everybody. We call other teams. Our trainers talk to NFL trainers. We try to find all the best ways to get these guys back. Ethan Reeve in the weight room, we talk to strength coaches `What are you doing for hamstrings?’ Some like to try to strengthen them. Some like to not strengthen them and try to stretch them. There are just 10 million different ways to go about it. We’ve tried every one.
“And the only thing I can promise you every year, 100 percent of the time, is that we will have some kids with hamstrings. It’s not even a definite probably maybe.’‘