The first thing Billy Price and Raekwon McMillan noticed when they arrived in Jamaica was the heat. The unrelenting, unavoidable, unending heat.
"Every time you stepped outside, the bigger we were, the more we sweat," McMillan said Thursday. "When you went out to the beach you started sweating as well."
"Through all the sweat, the mass amounts of sweat, just so much sweat," Price added, "you don't get to replicate that and I wouldn't change it for anything."
Price and McMillan joined men's basketball player Keita Bates-Diop and eight other Ohio State student-athletes Thursday at the Fawcett Center to inform reporters about their experience in the Caribbean providing shoes to children as part of Soles4Souls. A culturing experience, the football guys grew closer than ever before. They were, however, welcomed back by strength coach Mickey Marotti and a flurry of weights.
"The past couple days we've been saying, 'Wow, we're sore,'" Price said. "Workouts are like, woooo."
Getting out of routine for a week led to some soreness upon a re-entrance to Marotti's strength and conditioning dojo. But as Ohio State reconvenes to kick start its summer program, another chance at a clean slate is presented.
"It is a fresh start for our team because we're coming off spring ball, coming off classes where in the summertime you don't really deal with the coaches as much," McMillan said. "You're with the weight staff a lot, they're really hands on with us throughout the whole summer."
Ohio State's 2016 roster is young, a hot topic of discussion around Columbus and in a national scope especially with how much talent Urban Meyer sent to the NFL (12 draft picks, three undrafted free agents) last month.
Meyer and his staff labeled winter and spring drills part of "the year of development." The commencement of summer workouts is another page in that book, but a different animal entirely.
That is why McMillan and Price are hurting a little more than their teammates this week. Marotti sent exercise bands with the two players to Jamaica, but a full schedule of service got in the way of them getting much attention.
"He sent us with a lot of bands to be out there stretching a lot and doing some beat workouts but it's nothing compared to stuff we do at the Woody," McMillan said.
Clips of the workouts blipped up on the football team's Twitter account this week, complete with exercise before sunrise and of course Winner-Loser Day.
There can only be one winner.#WinnerLoser began today.#PowerOfTheUnit https://t.co/NzpcoUO7ps
— Ohio State Football (@OhioStateFB) May 18, 2016
Pads are nowhere to be found, tucked away in storage for those who earn them this fall. For now, it is all about the summer chore of early morning workouts and laying the groundwork for another successful season despite the roster's youth.
"The day after the Fiesta Bowl, we kind of had a group text going around throughout the team that this was a new team, this is a new year, a lot of things from last year that we have to change," McMillan said. "So what happened last year doesn't happen this year in our stadium."
