Among the ingredient list the Broncos brought from the Front Range: 250 pounds of rice, 40 gallons of executive chef Justin Domsch’s Pomodoro sauce, 25 gallons of other homemade sauces, 23 gallons of cherry juice and 20 pounds of various dried spices.
“Our executive chef spends a lot of time and a lot of energy and we spend a lot of resources from a quality perspective on our snacks, our proteins, our vegetables,” Thake said. “… Then there’s the component of when the guys come into the meal room, they see those familiar faces. The chefs, they know how they make their sandwiches. They know how they like their eggs cooked in the morning.
“That all just helps tie in and make it really seamless.”
Strong connections
When Trainor and the IT staff arrived here Thursday, Sept. 19, they started the process of setting up an entire wired network.
This isn’t unprecedented, but it doesn’t happen often. Trainor’s been with the club 14 years and said the other times they’ve done it include two Super Bowl weeks, a week with the Minnesota Vikings and the London trip.
Every year football, like many industries, becomes more reliant on technology to operate efficiently.
The Broncos, for example, film their practices with remote-operated, mast-mounted cameras that feed directly into the team’s storage system. Gone are the days of interns perched atop towers filming and tossing tapes or SD cards down to runners below.
“We try to mirror the footprint that we have back home as close as we can for these folks,” Trainor said. “So it’s planning that out. And, to be honest with you, it gets bigger and bigger each time we do it. We have more things on the network and, so compared to when we first did the Super Bowl in New York, it’s probably double the amount of people on the network and needs.”
Trainor said the Broncos had 400-500 devices on the network when he first started working for the team. Now there are about 8,000 at Empower Field alone.
When Denver played in Super Bowl XLVIII, it set up less than 100 at the team hotel. This week, it has about four times that. Friday morning through the team’s arrival Monday, Trainor and his crew were setting up the network and connecting everything to it.
“When they get here, they’re expecting the rooms to be ready,” Trainor said. “Like, the DBs coach will beeline right to the (meeting) room and they want to get going. Time is of the essence and that’s why we’re out here early. We’re trying to save everybody time so that when they get here it feels like home as much as it can.”
Will it pay off?
The big price tag and all of the logistical challenges are geared toward one thing: Making it easier on the players between a win against the Bucs and a chance to get back to 2-2 at the Jets on Sunday.
There’s a bonding element, too, that players have noted happens when they spend so much time together.
This is not training camp, however. This is about trying to get a win.
“You want to keep a routine as much as possible and kind of do the same things that you have been doing,” quarterback Bo Nix said Wednesday. “At the same time, you have some room to hang out with the guys. You’re not at home, so you can treat it a little bit differently. Use your routine, but also kind of ad-lib at the same time and enjoy each other’s company.
“… At the same time, rest and get ready for the game on Sunday.”
There’s an open question about whether the Broncos will return to The Greenbrier at some point.
Team president Damani Leech said earlier this summer that the plan is to hold 2025 training camp in Denver despite the team’s $175 million headquarters construction project.
“That is our goal,” he said, noting that fan attendance will be, at best, limited amid the construction.
Time will tell when the Broncos next are in need of a home away from home for more than a couple of days on U.S. soil. When they do, Conway said he’d be more interested in returning here than he thought before the trip.
“I do think that when we get back home, we’ll look back on this and this is going to have been a great experience for everyone,” he said.
Broncos plane movements Sept. 20-29
| Date | Flight | Purpose |
| Friday, Sept. 20 | Denver to Tampa | Team charter |
| Monday, Sept. 23 | Tampa to Greenbrier Regional | Private plane with equipment, video staff |
| Monday, Sept. 23 | Tampa to Greenbrier Regional | Offensive charter |
| Monday, Sept. 23 | Tampa to Greenbrier Regional | Defensive charter |
| Friday, Sept. 27 | Roanoke to Newark | Altered team charter |
| Sunday, Sept. 29 | Newark to Denver | Team charter |
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W. Va. — Somewhere in the blur of advance work last week, it finally hit Russ Trainor.
That’s what we forgot.
The quiet gave it away.
The Broncos’ senior vice president for information technology couldn’t help but find a little humor in the middle of a massive project.
He and dozens of others across his department and several others were grinding away at The Greenbrier Resort before the team beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Florida and flew up for a practice week unprecedented in franchise history. They had tons of equipment from Denver already unloaded off a 48-foot truck and a lot more work to do before the first of two team charters touched down Monday at Greenbrier Valley Regional Airport.
Some prepared the practice fields and set up the giant mast cams that film Broncos practice. Two team chefs and others worked with the resort kitchen staff to set up the week. Trainor and the IT folks were in the midst of building an entire wired network on which almost everything the club did for their days here would run.
And yeah, of course, there was one thing missing.
“We were building out the network and we were busy all day Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” Trainor told The Post with a laugh. “Nobody brought a little JBL speaker. It’s a little thing. Note to self: Bring a speaker for some music next time.”
If that’s all that slips through the cracks on the most complex road trip the Broncos have ever embarked on, everybody involved will be thrilled. If the Broncos fly home Sunday night with back-to-back road wins against the Buccaneers and the New York Jets? All the better.
What went into trying to make that happen — setting up an entire football operation here for the better part of five days — came with a roughly $2 million price tag, involved hundreds of people, countless meetings, months of preparation and even the Broncos honey the team gets from hives behind the indoor practice facility back home.
“In my 31-year career, this is the biggest movement I’ve ever done,” Broncos senior vice president of operations Chip Conway told The Post even before weather impacted the club’s travel later in the week. “We had seven different team plane movements, 15 different team bus movements and 11 equipment truck movements. I think we had 39 planned meals from the time we left Tampa to the time we get back from New York.
“So it’s a heavy lift.”
The Greenbrier
Payton and the New Orleans Saints had been considering ways to escape Louisiana’s August heat when he found himself caddying for friend and PGA Tour golfer Ryan Palmer at The Greenbrier in July 2013.
Turns out the resort’s owner, now West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, was looking for an NFL team to hold training camp at the facility.
They got to talking that week. Soon, plans started to come together.
“We’d met, and he put me in his cart and drove around where it might be,” Payton recalled this week. “That was Fourth of July …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Sports
