Camp Frank is well under way for the day.
"We have guys who go on the ice, guys who work out and guys who get treatment," Washington's strength and conditioning coach, Frank Costello, explains. The drill sergeant in charge of getting the Capitals' injured players back into game shape, Costello has been one of the team's busiest employees recently. He ticks off his charges.
"I have nine guys right now, including a goalie, so I could ice my own team at this point," he says.
"Yeah, we could put all the injured guys in wheelchairs," pipes up defenseman Sergei Gonchar, out four to six weeks with a sprained knee. "Just give us some sticks, and we'll go play out in the parking lot."
If only it were that easy. Instead, the injury rehabilitation that has become as much a part of being a Washington Capital as wearing the blue and bronze uniform is more like a chunk of pain each morning. Players try to push their injured appendages as far as they can at the practice facility in Odenton, Md., and Costello tries to push the rest of their bodies so their overall condition will remain game-worthy.
The top level of activity is the skating sessions before the regular team practices, and by 9:20 a.m., those far along enough in their recovery to make the cut take the ice. This morning it's Bulis, center Michal Pivonka and right wing Richard Zednik. Bulis is on the verge of graduating from Camp Frank altogether; this outing is to determine whether he can join the rest of the team for practice at 10 a.m.
Pivonka is still a month or two away from returning after shoulder surgery, but he has been skating the last few days. Zednik, who separated his shoulder two weeks ago, is in his second day on the ice, and since he can't shoot very much, Costello is making him skate hard. Zednik bends over every once in a while to catch his breath, holding his stick across his knees, and he's skinnier than he was a week ago. As if the team's injured players aren't miserable enough, they've been passing a bout of flu around to each other. Zednik lost nine pounds with the illness.
Defenseman Joe Reekie, who has a broken foot, has flu the worst right now. He was sent home without working out, but Costello was glad to get him onto the ice the day before, even if Reekie was only dressed in sweats.
"The most important step is getting a guy back on the ice, even if it's just Sunday afternoon skating, which is what Joe was doing," Costello says. "You don't want to get a guy out there too soon and set him back, but if he's ready it's a good step. I can get a person on a bicycle and have them in great cardiovascular condition, but the first day or two out here, they're sucking wind. Getting a guy back on the ice and skating is the only way to really get them back in shape."
By 9:45 a.m. Costello is deep into leading the on-ice workouts. Defenseman Brendan Witt is alone in the weight room, sitting on a two-foot inflatable silver ball. Pushed against a wall, the ball is used for resistance exercises and Witt, who has a strained hip flexor, is merely trying to straighten his leg until his foot is parallel to his knee. Each time he succeeds, he grimaces. This is progress, though, because a few days ago he couldn't even get his foot off the floor.
Every once in a while, Witt glances down the hall, where his healthy teammates are joking with each other and getting ready for their practice.
"Being injured is really the worst because you're an outcast from the rest of the team," he says. "The guys are all over you, like 'Hey, Band Aid, when are you coming back?' and you just want to be out there and playing. But this is a lot better than when I broke my wrist [two years ago.] I'm out seven to 10 days with this, so I have something to work for. Back then, it was three months in a cast, and it felt like a year."
The sounds from down the hall slowly die out as the Capitals take the ice around 10 a.m. Costello and his troops are back inside now, and Gonchar has joined Witt in the weight room. His knee is too tender for him to use the bicycle or treadmill very much, so to stay in shape, Gonchar is seated at a machine called a UBE (pronounced "you-be"). The UBE has handles that move like bike pedals, and Gonchar is supposed to turn them for 30 minutes.
The workout can be grueling, Costello explains, because a person's upper body is often not used to that kind of motion. As Gonchar's face slowly shifts from pale white to crimson and then finally to an odd, greenish shade, Zednik and Yogi Svejkovsky come into the weight room. Camp Frank is in full swing again, as Costello starts shifting back and forth between managing Witt and Zednik on the weights and Svejkovsky, who has an ankle sprain, on the treadmill.
Each player is timed in each exercise, and Costello keeps track of everything in a black-and-white spotted composition book, the Mead brand with thick lined paper most commonly seen in elementary schools. The information inside is much more complicated than simple arithmetic, however, and Costello will spend time later in the day surveying the data with Capitals trainer Stan Wong and team doctor Marc Connell, who is visiting.
Right now, he is too busy to even drink from his ever-present cup of coffee, which sits on one of the unused weight machines.
"It's like running a three-ring circus," Costello says while walking between players. "The whole thing you try to do is motivate them to take that next step, take that next step. We try to cover all the bases, and believe it or not, we try to do a lot of preventive stuff too.
"There have been so many injuries on this team, and people are always asking why. Every injury affects me too, and it's very disheartening when a guy goes down. We've looked for a pattern, and we can't find anything. I mean, if a guy loses his edge and goes feet-first into the boards [like Bulis,] he's going to sprain an ankle. I can't do anything about that. But it's still very hard for the guys."
Costello goes on to explain some of the preventive maintenance tried by some of the players, including goaltender Rick Tabaracci, who had hernia surgery early in the summer to cure his groin problems of last season. He had been working out with the big silver ball to strengthen the muscles, but his groin popped anyway during a game against Calgary a few days ago.
The Capitals were forced to recall goaltender Mike Rosati from the minors, and Tabaracci is now being forced to take a few days off the ice. Around 10:40 a.m., he appears in the bike room.
"Don't include me with the injured guys," he says, frustrated. "I don't want to be here."
As Tabaracci settles into the rhythm of his stationary bicycle, Gonchar wanders in for some water. He says he felt like he was going to throw up during the final few minutes on the UBE, but he is better now and is going to change into a clean shirt for the rest of his workout. Witt, Svejkovsky and Zednik join Tabaracci on the bikes, although by 11:05 a.m. Costello has Tabaracci on the floor of the weight room, stretching out the nimble goaltender's leg, groin and hip muscles.
Pivonka is also in the weight room by now, preparing to do some lower body work. He is currently the longest-running member of Camp Frank, having injured his shoulder last spring. He spent the summer with Costello trying to let the shoulder heal through rehabilitation, but two weeks before training camp doctors informed him he'd need surgery. That meant at least two more months away from the team, maybe three.
Someone asks him if he has reached his boiling point with the injury.
"Oh, I lost it a long time ago, after finding out that I needed the surgery anyway after all that work – that was really hard," he says. "Now I'm just working on it, and it's not so bad because there's not much I can do about it right now.
"For 10 or 11 years I was never really hurt much, never missed more than a couple games, and then the last couple of years I had a knee and a shoulder and a groin and broken hand. It's part of the game, but going through rehab is the hardest thing. You're not doing what you are supposed to do, which is play hockey."
By 11:15 a.m., Washington's healthy players are starting to filter off the ice, mixing into the weight room. Several of the injured players have retreated into the training room, where many will get their second dose of treatment of the day. Wong uses ice, heat, electronic stimulation and whirlpools, but after three seasons of seemingly unending injuries for the Capitals – last season Washington lost a team-record 476 man-games – one player surmises that Wong may soon need to resort to a seance.
Bulis, who passed Costello's inspection earlier and has been on the ice with the rest of the team, passes by around 11:30 a.m. He is breathing hard as he heads to the dressing room, almost four hours after he started this morning.
"I'm not having any sharp pains or anything; I'm just tired," he says, collapsing by his locker stall. "I've been working out with Frank, so I'm in pretty good shape, but the first day is always a struggle with the hands. It's nice to be out with the guys, though. Being injured – it's just the worst."