On The Line: There's no replacing Latrobe

HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. -- Early yesterday morning, the NFL released guidelines for teams and athletes to follow when the time comes to open up their facilities. Those include changes for everything imaginable: Exercising, weight training, food service, personal protection equipment ... even hygiene.

Hygiene?

If you ask me, that seems more of a personal issue more than a team issue.

I joke about it, but these new rules will lead to a lot of changes in the near future as society slowly starts to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. I imagine these changes will be executed smoothly. And that they'll be followed. With the amount of time players and staff have been away from each other, they shouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize their chances of playing the game they love.

When I say the guys miss being around each other, I do mean that.

At the end of the 2019 season, Mike Tomlin usually would tell us to take time away from each other to digest everything that had just happened. In reality, I think he was telling us we are too close and too connected, and I laugh at it because it’s true. Professional athletes usually spend more time with their teammates than families or friends. Everyone involved in your life understands, but he's right: It’s good to turn the focus back to them when the season is over.

Getting back to work this summer will be different. We won't see the guys in Latrobe this July and August. We won't even see them at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, the training facility. No, the Steelers announced yesterday afternoon that training camp will be held at Heinz Field.

In a global sense, it's something small. In the world of Steelers football, this is huge.

Every player won’t admit it, but they hate the work that goes into camp -- the everyday hitting, the blisters from wearing cleats again, walking up and down the steps before and after practice, being in a dorm room ... I could go on longer about the things I disliked, but you get the point.

Still, there are those small things about camp that can't be put in a box. Dejan Kovacevic asked me last week on Morning Java to describe what it meant to me, and it made me reflect more on what goes on at camp that you will not see anywhere else.

Arrival day at camp is filled with emotion. I never was a guy to show up in a front-loader or helicopter, so the biggest obstacle for me was getting by the media blitz that swarmed my truck and asked questions about the team's future, the camp sleeper or the start of a new season. The new guidelines will change all that for everyone, of course, including the media.

As much as the players have a schedule, so do the fans. Wal-Mart is packed with fans for the first couple of days because they know players will have to get all the essentials needed to survive camp. A lot of them carry autograph books and footballs that date back a decade or more. I remember signing a football with two other No. 73 players on them: Craig Wolfley and Kendall Simmons. (That ball was a walk into history. I was proud to be asked to join that list.)

The most noticeable thing was the monks draped in black and walking around campus. Saint Vincent is home to about 100 monks and one -- Father Paul Taylor -- happens to be a good friend of mine. He’s also the college president and attended my wedding in Nashville.

Fans can see rookies get kicked off golf carts because a veteran player needs a ride to the weight room or the cafeteria.

They could hear the guys sitting on the concrete stoop outside Rooney Hall, throwing jokes at the person approaching for no reason, or getting dragged into a heated debate about the best basketball player ever.

It always is the small things that really put a smile on your face. Being in Latrobe does that.

There are also some things it doesn't have, and those are good, too.

It takes away most things that aren't football. I think coaches and staff would agree that being in Pittsburgh can lead to distractions, particularly for the younger guys. There’s just more to do in the city. Out in Latrobe, on that campus, we have only each other and football. We have time to be friends. We each have time to find our guy, if you will, someone we can maybe mentor.

We'd call some young guys 'Day Ones," because we'd see certain traits in a long-shot rookie -- right away -- that we felt would eventually work in their favor. Some of my "Day Ones" were Roosevelt Nix and Robert Golden. Derwin Gray is another, because I saw how he was trying to break down the complexities of the game, how he navigated being a true professional. If you check Derwin's social media, you can tell he took heed to some of conversations we’ve had. Another guy I got a chance to learn more about was Zach Banner. He’s not a "Day One," but he’s a guy I was able to show what it takes to go to the next level. Camp affords those type of relationships. Latrobe is where work relationships become brotherhoods and family.

People have been asking me for months what about football I will miss, and I usually hit them with one or two answers:

1. I just want the guys to get back to work so I can enjoy them sweating and doing what they love.

2. I'll miss the locker room talks and the camaraderie of being around the guys.

For Steelers fans, not seeing your team develop at Saint Vincent will be a setback, too. Having fans at practice can be a bit much at times, especially during a bad day or when you get embarrassed in a drill, but it’s all part of the process. It wasn’t until later in my career that I found out some NFL teams don’t allow fans to visit camp and don’t have as many open practices. In a sick kind of way, I enjoyed the pressure of performing or at least holding my own. We'd hear about it when the offense had a good day or completed a deep ball. We'd hear about it if the offense had a subpar day, too.

But it's important we keep pushing and supporting each other. These are times we couldn’t have predicted, but we are a nation of strong people and, as a sports base, there’s no stronger fan base than Steelers Nation.

Hopefully, I'll see you guys at Heinz Field.

Here we go.