There is strength in numbers, sure, but listening to Jason Novak, the new strength and conditioning coach for Michigan State’s football program, you get a strong sense of just how hard it can be to keep an accurate accounting of things in the midst of a pandemic.
Novak arrived in East Lansing the last week of February, “and we had a week’s worth of training before everything got shut down,” he said. With COVID-19 effectively closing Michigan State’s campus, spring practice was canceled on March 13 and much of the Spartans’ roster headed home soon after that to wait things out.