Everything It Takes For An NFL Team To Play Internationally | LA Chargers

Everything It Takes For An NFL Team To Play Internationally | LA Chargers

Sao Paulo, Brazil. For the second straight year, the NFL is celebrating the first Friday of the season in the world’s fourth largest. This is week one. This is the first game. We know that our job has been done. If they don’t notice anything, you know, just incredible what our people were able to do. Everybody in the building just crushed it. It was seamless. It was It was tremendous. Hi, I’m Christina Derutder, our director of football logistics for the Los Angeles Chargers, and we are going to show you everything it took to take an NFL team to Brazil. There’s just so many little things that go into these trips that, you know, people don’t really realize that go on behind the scenes. It starts off in the springtime. When you find out about the game, everyone kind of springs into action. John Weedmmer and I are on our operations side. We handle all things flights, buses, hotels, schedules, making sure the team leaves the bolt and somehow makes it to Sao Paulo, Brazil. This is working closely with our nutrition department, athletic training, the strength team, coaches, all the players, our equipment department. I’m in charge of getting all our equipment/cargo down to Brazil and back. It’s a big job, a lot of work. Started by sending out cargo on a ship. Believe it or not, that stuff is already there. And now we’re in the process of getting our equipment shipped across the country to New York, New Jersey. It will go on an air cargo plane down to Brazil. It’s currently 6:30 a.m. and we’re here at the loading dock preparing everything for Brazil getting everything shipped and ready to go for week one. Really just have to look at everything we need for a game. Consider this as any other away game. So all the things we normally take for an away game, but then we have to consider the additional things we need for a slightly extended trip. A lot of our food and beverage items. Grant and Kate worked with Chris to get that stuff sent down in the spring. We actually sent out most of our product in May. Keeping that in mind when we’re packing, looking at expiration dates. We sent about four very large husky bins worth of product around 1,000 lbs alto together of just like snacks and items that we’ be needing down there, supplements as well. One thing that I had to include in packing is accounting for the condiments that the hotel might not be able to source. There’s a lot of items that aren’t necessarily available in S. Paulo that we have here um in the US. special ingredients, things that guys were used to. I think one of the bigger ones was peanut butter. I think we shipped around 20 lbs of peanut butter. We don’t have Uncrustables down in Brazil either. So, that was one of the things that we were trying to cover. Our consumption of PB&Js is so high that we want it to be consistent. Getting, you know, 150 plus people through customs into a foreign country and back is not easy. The visa and passport process began back in the springtime. This means making sure that everyone from our players to our coaches to any potential staff that could be traveling out to Brazil has a valid passport and has applied for and received the visa in hand. From that time when we got their passports, I started immediately John and myself applying for all the players and coaches visas, which is also a lengthy process. It is a challenge with it being a week one international game. I did four visas for the try out guys just in case they made it. And then we had a couple players who might have joined the team. So I did their visas just in case. I have about 180 passports in my office all labeled and organized and neatly locked away in boxes along with everyone’s visas. So making sure we get all that together just so it’s as seamless as possible for our players. So we’re scanning them, uh, labeling them, putting them away for safekeeping. The only time we gave them back is if they were going on a trip this summer. So then we had to recollect some of them. We brought a team down to Brazil in the springtime to take a look at everything from the airport to the practice site, the hotel, and the stadium itself to make sure that we got eyes on all the locations down there to make sure that we had everything we needed to succeed in Brazil. The field to look at what type of cleats we need to wear, the locker room to know how many lockers we have available to us. We met with the hotel and their catering team. They did a presentation for us. Grant was able to collab with the stadium, with the hotel to find a nice blend between a Brazilian culture and cooking and what the players, coaches, and staff are all accustomed to. From there, Chris Smith helmed the uh Carne, which is a list of everything and anything we could possibly need down in Brazil because with it being international, you can’t just send stuff down. It’s got to go through a customs process. This is my seventh international game. I’ve dealt with the logistics, the manifest, the carets for all those trips. This has probably been the most difficult of all of them logistically because we’re having to split up our shipments. We really got to keep track of everything. Being able to go through a couple other international games between London and Mexico City. We had some good experience and lessons learned for the packing. We did talk to our different counterparts at the Packers and the Eagles. both teams having played there last year to, you know, see their experience with the locker rooms with the field, want to make sure that we get the right footwear on the players. So, it was interesting to talk to them and to see what worked for them, what didn’t work for them. That really helps to get that knowledge from them. And then just going over with the NFL and the medical staffs down in Brazil to make sure that our emergency action plans are buttoned up. We’re going to be out of our home area but also our home country and privileges are different and we need to make sure that we have access to the highest level medical care that we expect here. The NFL hires a company called Rocket Cargo that helps with the logistics and the the manifest and getting the items through customs. And what they’ll do is they’ll ask for a carnea or a manifest of all your equipment. The equipment is broken down by case or box or bag, how much that bag or case costs, and then the contents, where it’s all made, the value. So, it’s very timeconuming. Everybody in the company that has equipment on the trip chips in and we all put it together into one big sheet. Our players gear, the jerseys, cameras that our production team uses, the rollers that our strength staff uses, every bit of tape, medicine that needed to be down there basically gets categorized, itemized. So this is the carne. This is what’s been sent to Rocket Cargo. This is what’s been sent to Brazil customs. Literally thousands of items packed in over a hundred different cases and bags and boxes. A lot of research has gone into this by all the departments in the company to get the numbers right. Following practice on Tuesday, the players will have about an hour to get themselves showered, cleaned, ready to go uh for this flight. Muscles of the park at 3:45. Then we’ll be wheels up at uh 5:00. But man, you got to look back and just look at the the amount of work that’s gone into this, right, to put us to where we are right now. That’s half the battle. Now we get to the games and uh put the exclamation point on. American and TSA will send out personnel to do full check on everybody. We let the players know. You’ll get a packet with your boarding pass, visa, and passport in it. You’ll show it to uh the TSA agent at the Bolt. Then we’ll have another charger staff member collect it back from you before you even leave the parking lot to get on the bus. And then when we land in Brazil, myself and three others will be stationed in front of customs. We’ll hand them that packet back again that has all of their documents needed to enter the country. They’ll go through customs, hand over those documents, and then John, he’s on the advance for this trip. So he’ll be on the other side with a big basket to collect everyone’s information again on that set, and we’ll do it again for the return. So really trying to take out all the questions, all the stress for the players and our staff and make it just an easy seamless trip. It’s just a little bit longer than normal. I normally advance the airport early. So I’ll go early to LAX, make sure the players and all their seats are correct and we have everything accounted for. So we ordered extra, you know, premium blankets for everyone. Our nutrition staff is putting hydration packets together. Our athletic training staff is putting plane kits together with like blue light glasses and different things for recovery. We want to make sure they have ample electrolyte access throughout the flight. So, I’ll help make sure all of those get on the players and coaches seats. So, that’s all ready to hopefully have a smooth flight. We are utilizing a larger plane than we typically would. We’re on a trip 7300, more lay flat seats for players, more space to spread out for coaches and staff, as well as resources available from our athletic training staff and the American Airlines folks. Because for those 12 and 1/2 hours, that is our home. The athletic training staff worked closely with UCLA Health and local doctors in order to make sure that they had the right game plan for approaching the time change and the long flight to Brazil. When we first got word that we were playing in Brazil and they said that the game time was at 9:00 p.m. It’s daunting to start and then you think about it with a 4 hour time difference. Their 900 pm start time is our normal prime time 5:00 pm start time. So, uh, we look at this as staying on our normal prime time schedule for a game like this. What we want to do is stay to the West Coast time and utilizing our circadian rhythm to our advantage. We don’t want to adjust to their timeline and wake up early just because it’s 8:00 in the morning because that’s 4:00 in the morning our time and we’re only going to be there for a short time, a few days. So, we want to make sure that it doesn’t affect us while we’re there, but also doesn’t affect us for the weeks to come after that. So, our plan is if we’re taking off around 5:00 p.m. our local time here in LA, we look for guys to get to bed around the same time on the flight that they normally would when they’re at home. So, you know, around 4 hours into the flight, they’ll have dinner, they’ll start to wind down. uh we’ll put our our blue light glasses on, maybe turn off some of the electronics, and then around 5 hours into the flight, that’ll be about 1000 p.m. If that’s a normal sleep time for a player, then we should look to put our our night masks on, our sleep masks, our headphones in, or uh better yet, earplugs and try to wind down and go to sleep around our normal time. And if we can get quality sleep on the flight uh after a good meal and some hydration, then that when we get there in the morning, we land around 9:00 a.m. local time in Brazil. Well, that’s about 5:00 a.m. our time. Then we’re going to look to get moving a little bit once we get there and provide an opportunity for a pool workout. Also insert a sleep opportunity there for about 20 to 30 minute nap so that we can prolong our day a little bit longer. On the back end, we’re having later meetings and we’re sleeping in more and trying to stay as close to our time clock just because it has a 9:00 p.m. local kick time, which is really for us a 5:00 p.m. prime time game. Everything we sent on the cargo ship back in May was held in a storage facility and then we have part of our team goes a little bit early to Brazil and they’re able to identify that we have everything that we’ve sent and then to separate it between what we intended to bring to the hotel and then what we want to keep at the stadium. So it’s Monday, September 1st. We’ve got all of our gear starting to arrive to the hotel. This is all the uh items that we had to send early about a week early to get on down here. Nick Adela and our equipment staff. He’s going to take an inventory of everything that’s coming on in. Make sure everything arrived from the plane. This is our game jerseys here. I’m just making sure that we count every single one. Not only do we have a primary jersey for every single player, but we also have a backup for every single player just in case there’s any rips or tears during the game. Our legendary equipment manager, Chris Smith, who’s been here for over 30 years, told me that the only way that we can we can play a game is if we have our jerseys. You know, if we forget, you know, our extra cleats, our our extra, you know, hoodies or shorts or whatever, all these extra things that we have, the most important thing is that we have our jersey and pants and uh everything else after that, we can play the game as long as we have that and our pads. So, once the team arrives on Wednesday, they’ll have all their player bags with their uh player equipment to ensure safety. We also send via shipment back in May a lot of our FMD. So that’s all arriving here at the hotel today. We’re going to inventory that, go through our stock, make sure everything is here so that we know that if there’s anything last second we need brought on over on the plane, they can start getting that packed before the team takes off tomorrow. Team’s going to be here in about 24 hours. So the main thing we want to do today is go through all of our inventory of stuff that we brought that we weren’t going to be able to source here in Brazil. So looking through all these containers, kind of getting it in the designated areas. Yeah, essentially going through this and making sure that the culinary team here is ready to go for when we arrive. Excited. We’ve got all of our spaces here to replicate what it is that we do at the training facility and for both home and road games. Um all of our meeting spaces for offense, defense, we’ve got training room, we’ve got our meal space, storage area, place for equipment to disperse all of the training gear. Yes, that’s perfect. Yeah. Amazing. Could we put water on this bottom shelf, too? Just because they’re going to take a lot of water. Doing some room checks now to make sure that everything looks ready to go for everybody. Just make sure they have a fridge available. No alcohol in the rooms. Excellent. Do we have the AC on in all the rooms? 20. I think 20 is good. That’s true. So, they gave us master keys for the hotel in case we need to get into anyone’s rooms. Six for us, right? Six. Yeah. Test them out. and worm. That’s the one. Now we’re just doing some amenity checks for some VIP of our team. Get a little gift in the room for when they arrive. Be here. Nice. We’re going to provide. Perfect. Fruit and cheese tray and chicken a chicken fingers. Yeah. Chicken tenders. Chicken fingers. I think he I mean if you guys do them fried. Yeah. Perfect. This is where the team will arrive. buses will pull up. They’ll come off, pick up their room keys here, and then head up to our team space and go to the rooms. When the team gets off the bus, we want to make sure that everything feels right. Um everything feels as it would for a normal travel routine. So, they’ll they’ll get off the bus, uh they’ll be able to just go inside the hotel, pick up their key as they normally would. We’re actually going to be uh practicing at uh CT Wim Gra, which is the practice site for Corinthians soccer team. Oh, you got it. There we go. Mine’s on. Yes, sir. No, no, no. Oi, [Laughter] wait. One more. One more. A po. [Applause] You been He been working on it all the time. I’ve been I’ve been working on it. I’ve been working on that. I’d like to just say uh just how excited we are to be here. The the hospitality has been amazing. We just got here this morning, but uh already at the airport and everywhere we’ve gone, uh we’ve been made to feel welcome. The only thing we’re focused on is going, you know, one and0 right now. Uh the Chiefs are a great team. We know what they’re capable of and what they’ve done in years past. Um so we know if we want to, you know, be the best, we got to got to compete. This is the NFL giving us opportunity to uh expand our fan base and get into different countries and be able to do that. Just wondered, obviously a lot of quarterbacks have very strict like rituals and routines in in the game a week before a game. I just wondered traveling over here how that has changed it for you. Maybe things you aren’t able to do that you would normally do or things you’ve had to adjust slightly for your own preparation. Um, no. I think we’ve we’ve done a good job and and fortunately we’ve we’ve got great team nutritionists that have been able to provide us with, you know, all the resources that we need while traveling and so we’re hydrated. We’re doing everything we can foodwise as well to prepare us for the game. Uh um so huge shout out to the the team nutritionist for the Chargers. Thank you guys. This was the last question. Thank you to the players. Uh, thank you for today. Ciao. [Applause] In Brazil, we’re going to do a Brazilian steakhouse night is something that’s a little bit more themed to the location. I think that’s something that this organization is really great about is we try to embrace a bit of the culture wherever we go whether that’s um within here within the US different cities and then now going down to Brazil with Sa Paulo we’re doing a Brazilian traditional Turasco as they call it like a Brazilian steakhouse kind of cookout giving the guys something fun and a little um hopefully get their minds off of what’s happening the trip the travel kind of get them a little time to relax and get some delicious food in. It’s familiar as well because a lot of meat the guys are going to be familiar with and excited to eat. Um hopefully get them fed and fueled and then also provide them that relaxing atmosphere of being outside with each other with their friends, their teammates, those sort of things. Um getting ready for the game. The football field that we’re playing on is very similar to Green Bay. It’s a hybrid field which means it’s both natural grass and synthetic woven through. Chris Smith is making sure the players all have the right type of footwear for that field. you know, it’s a soccer field, so it the grass is more of a soccer type grass. So, we’re um encouraging our players to wear detachable cleats, which are screw-in cleats on that surface. Gives them better traction and just be aware of getting their feet under them and and the ability to to know that they might lose your traction without putting more thought into it. Locker rooms for soccer teams are much smaller, but there there is space, so it’s just broken up. Instead of having one big room like we typically have for an NFL stadium, we’ll have a smaller room for the defense, a smaller room for the offense. The coaches will be in another room. Besides that, you know, it’s just it’s a stadium and and we’re able to adapt. I mean, we can we can go into a high school locker room if we have to and set up for a game. So, you know, just give us a space, we’ll figure it out. Uh we’ll we’ll make it happen. He’ll always take care of do the coaches locker room. I’ll do the staff locker room. I feel like week after week you know exactly what like your section your group likes and then you can kind of tailor your whatever you’re doing to them. Um cuz Kevin and I like some coaches require certain things and you just know instead of someone else doing it every week. We’re just basically setting up the lockers and then we’ll probably go on the field get the field equipment correct. Basically just making sure it’s a seamless process for tomorrow. When they get out here, they can just worry about getting on the field and taking care of business tomorrow against the Chiefs. This is week one. This is the first game. It’s a big one. We know that our job has been done from an operations standpoint. Christina and myself if they don’t notice anything. So if the players, coaches, and staff can wake up on game day, be able to go downstairs, be able to eat, do all their rituals, have their meetings, do their pregame walkthrough, get on that bus, and get to the stadium, then I know that we’ve done our job and we’ve done our part in making sure that, you know, the team has the tools that they need to succeed. And then Friday, it’s game day in Brazil. When we get to the stadium, we’re arriving in the stadium about 3 and 1/2 hours prior to kickoff. the players are going to be able to get there, start their routine. The league works with their partners to make sure that we’ve got everything to make that stadium and that locker room feel like a home locker room and a home experience. Looking middle. Momes using his feet to extend the play. Tries to spin out. Can’t get away. Dropped. Sacked. Deon Henley to the 40 to the 45 to the 50. He slides down. First down Chargers. Justin Herbert uses his legs and that is going to do it at the two-minute warning. So, following the end of the game, our clock starts 60 minutes after the last whistle blows. Our buses are rolling out of the stadium. That was one heck of a job. Give each other a high five for that. Okay, we got a 14-hour flight. [Applause] Happy flight. Happy shirt off. Happy field corn. Field corn all the way. Love it. Love it. And uh one question for you. Hey, 60 minutes. So we got to be out here in 60 minutes. So it better. [Applause] As soon as the game hits 000 in Brazil, myself and two others on our staff are going to take a shuttle to the airport where we have all of our passports and visas. We’ll set them all out. We’ll hand them their packet and they’ll go through normal security. On the other end, we’ll have another staff member collect it back again and then get immediately on the plane. We’ll take off and we’ll be landing in the afternoon on Saturday, uh the day after the game. really amongst our staff. We keep talking about, “Oh, we can’t wait until Saturday afternoon when we get back to the US because then we’ll know that all of our hard work for months on end that it’s all been worth it. It’s a relief to get through these trips because it’s a lot of work, but for what we do, it’s like the ultimate challenge. When you get through it and especially if you win it, it’s very rewarding. Take a lot of pride in going down there and putting on a good show. When you get into the stadiums and the energy level, uh, it’s really exciting. Our team is infectious. I know we see it cuz we see them every day, but getting them there in person, seeing them interact with fans, I think their fans will fall in love with our players like we do. And I’m really excited for that opportunity. You know, it’s going to feel great to touch down on September 6th, knowing that we accomplish something great in Brazil. We got the job done. Now on to the next one. Everybody in the building just crushed it. I mean, just absolutely crushed the trip from the equipment staff, training staff, nutrition staff, our security staff, our video staff, PR staff, everybody in Brazil, Roger Goodell, should take a deep long bow, the NFL. I mean, you know, just incredible what our people were able to do. It was seamless. It was It was tremendous. [Music]

Ever wonder what it takes for an NFL team to play internationally? Hear from Director of Football Operations John Wiedmeier and Director of Football Logistics Christina DeRuyter as they break down everything that went into the LA Chargers’ season opener in São Paulo, Brazil vs the Kansas City Chiefs. Get an all-access perspective with the Bolts’ nutrition, equipment, and athletic training staff on all the planning and preparation that went into the 6,000-mile journey to South America, which led to Jim Harbaugh, Justin Herbert, Derwin James Jr., and the Chargers’ victory over Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Chiefs. Presented by American Airlines.

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