Courtesy Winnipeg Free Press:

Strolling into the locker-room yesterday, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that the 2008 campaign feels awfully like an extension of the 2007 season. There just wasn’t that defining sense of division or closure you usually notice from one season to the next in the air.

Maybe it was all the familiar faces already present and accounted for in the stalls or maybe it’s just the fact that because of our run all the way to the Grey Cup last November, this off-season was shorter than most. Either way, one thing that does remain constant is the arrival of training camp, and like most things in football, it is sudden and brutal in nature.

The rookies kick things off on Wednesday with their own little mini camp and they are joined by all the quarterbacks — veteran and otherwise — who, in my mind, are atoning for the fact that they will not be touched at all throughout training camp and thereby deserve to get started four days earlier than the rest of us. For those who have never participated or watched a professional football camp before, the process, I imagine, is not unlike sorting, grading and processing different cuts of meat at the slaughterhouse.

On Saturday, all the cattle are herded into a banquet room for the preliminary examinations and orientation speeches before we are put out to pasture on Sunday. After our GM and/or head coach speaks to us briefly, equipment guru Brad Fotty lectures us on the do’s and don’ts of the locker-room — which many of us need stapled to our heads — and then assistant GM Ross Hodgkinson usually yells at us more out of habit and tradition than necessity. Then our day of being poked, prodded, measured and weighed begins in earnest. Over the next three hours or so, every player will see not one but two doctors, a dentist, an optometrist, an athletic therapist and a host of media personnel and production assistants from the club and TSN for our head shots, bios and television cameos. Those of us who have the good sense to live in Winnipeg year round can pretty much skip out on everything but the camera segments, as we were fortunate to have most of our examinations scheduled before the rest of the herd arrived.

While the onfield stampeding, milling and grazing does not begin in earnest until June 1, the mental gymnastics, which we all know in professional sports are an even bigger determinant than the physical, get going right away after dinner on Saturday. Players will be introduced to the head coach, their offensive or defensive co-ordinators, their individual position coaches and the team’s special teams coach. A few pleasantries will be exchanged and then it’s straight to the playbooks, where for some it will be a third-year review and for others a completely new experience.

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