Vet News: Orange Basketball Team Gets Daylong Workout at Fort Drum

Matt Gorman struggled off the muddy trail gasping for air. "We come out of the woods, and you think you’re done," said Gorman, a senior forward on Syracuse’s men’s basketball team. "There were a bunch of sergeants standing there waiting by two Humvees, and one sergeant says, ‘Get those bodies on those Humvees,’ "And I’m thinking, oh, I’m going to climb in this thing," Gorman said with a smile. "I’m starting to climb in and he says, ‘Get out and push it.’ "

Up a hill, no less.

And Gorman thought coach Jim Boeheim’s workouts were tough.

In early October, Gorman and most of his teammates sampled a day of physical training Army-style. School officials had been trying for a couple of years to arrange something with the military, and it finally came together with a big assist from Gorman’s father, Bob, who worked out the details with Syracuse strength coach Todd Forcier.

"I wanted to do something fun, get a workout in but still learn how to be a team and to do team-oriented stuff instead of individual stuff," Forcier said.

There’s probably no better place in New York state to do that than the home of the Army’s famed 10th Mountain Division, an hour drive north of the Carrier Dome.

"Why not go to the guys that do it all the time, that depend on it for their lives," said 39-year-old Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hibbs, a 22-year Army veteran who helped devise a most memorable workout. "If anybody is going to take it seriously, the military will."

Boeheim was on board from the start.

The team boarded a bus at dawn. When they arrived, it was back to school, so to speak.

"Some of them didn’t want to go to bed (the night before) because they didn’t want to miss their wakeup," Hibbs said. "You could tell they were not used to getting up that early to sit through a lecture, but as a whole they seemed pretty excited."

After a briefing, everybody stretched, warmed up, and dropped into formation for a jog. Even though his dad was behind the whole thing, Matt Gorman was surprised at what unfolded. His father had told him he’d probably have to slow down so the Army guys could keep up.

"We started off with a real casual jog," Gorman said. "We’d all been running in preseason, so a little jog to us ain’t nothing. We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. We didn’t know it was going to be 4.5 miles."

And that along the way they’d have to run about three-quarters of a mile carrying heavy weapons, then take turns lugging stretchers laden with 200 pounds of water another mile.

Fatigue set in fast.

"It doesn’t take very long to smoke somebody," Hibbs said.

More duress ensued when the trail turned muddy.

"When you’re running on terrain that’s not very stable carrying a stretcher, it gets a little tough," Gorman said.

Judging by the reaction of hulking sophomore forward Arinze Onuaku, the Humvee push was the signature moment of the day.

Even though he was facing knee surgery, Onuaku joined the fray and helped the Orange surge past another Humvee being pushed by soldiers as both teams raced up the hill.

"I saw my teammates pushing hard, and I’m one of the strongest guys on the team," said the 6-foot-9, 255-pound Onuaku. "So I got in there and helped. Everyone was tired, but everyone was working together."

"You could only go 30 seconds as hard as you could go before you were dead, so someone else had to be ready to go," Forcier said. "If that thing stopped rolling, it was over, no way you could get it started again."

The push has left a lasting impression.

"The greatest thing we saw was there were guys fresh back from Iraq, guys that had been shot, had shrapnel in their bodies as we were running with them," Forcier said. "There was a guy pushing the Humvee in front of us who had knee braces on. He still had pieces of metal in his legs and body, and he was out there working."

When the physical part was over, the Orange learned about explosives, visited a firing range, then conducted a basketball clinic for about 60 base kids. They also were given a flag that once flew over Baghdad as a souvenir that will adorn a locker room wall in the Carrier Dome.

"It’s so enlightening to see that," Syracuse athletic director Daryl Gross said. "For our guys to see that and be a part of that, God, that was really positive. So many great things came out of that one day."

SOURCE: AP News