How has the health held? An in-depth look into VCU’s injury-free season
VCU's players group up together during the team's open practice at the Coliseum Thursday.
Adam Stern
Executive Editor
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As Shaka Smart stood on the Richmond Coliseum court Thursday afternoon and was presented with the question of how his team has been able to remain so healthy all year, he made sure to do one thing before tendering an answer.
“I’m going to knock on wood,” he said, before bending over and— in a superstitious bid to keep the good health humming— knocking his knuckles on the hardwood.
With VCU coming into Saturday’s quarterfinal matchup in the CAA Tournament having won 21 of their last 24 games, the Rams do so with an exceedingly clean bill of health. VCU redshirt freshman Heath Houston has been out the majority of a season with multiple injuries. Houston aside, there has barely been an injury that has kept a VCU player out of a game to speak of.
In a sport that can produce a wide-ranging array of injuries, the question of how have the Rams been able to stay so healthy is a pertinent one. Is it luck, skill, good preparation or a combination of those factors?
“Yeah, it’s a combination,” Smart said before mapping out the different factors to it.
“First of all, Daniel (Roose) does a really good job as our strength coach; the No. 1 job of a strength coach is injury prevention, and most people don’t know that. And (team trainer) Eddie (Benion) has been very diligent in all his work.
And, like you said, some luck, and, the last thing would be, there have been some injuries that not everyone knows about and guys have just fought through, and that’s a credit to our guys and … their ability to battle through.”
One player who has certainly battled through his fair share of injuries through the seasons has been the team’s lone senior, forward Bradford Burgess. With a start in the quarterfinal, Burgess will tie basketball legend Patrick Ewing with the most consecutive starts all time, and with a start in the semifinal, he would break it.
When assessing how he’s been able to remain so relatively injury-free through the years— or at least healthy enough to start every game— Burgess was similar to Smart in that he noted it was not because of any one reason.
“Just working out the way we do, trying to take care of our bodies each and every day, getting treatment, getting with our great training staff,” Burgess said. “Coach emphasizes (to us) to not to go as hard in certain days in order to keep our body fresh, and we’ve been able to be fairly healthy this year.”
Of course, any conversation about ways a team has remained healthy is naturally going to include tangible things like strength workouts and treatment from a training stuff. But when asked to evaluate how the team has been able to remain injury-free the whole season, junior shooting guard Troy Daniels emphasized the intangible just as greatly.
“It’s just everybody as a whole wanting to play,” Daniels said. “It’s that cliché: you can be hurt and play through being hurt but you can’t play through being injured; Heath is injured. And guys have nicks and bruises, but we all want to win so, we just want to be on the court.”
