Greg Delimitros is doing some gameplanning, so he pulls out a long, laminated calendar. He isn’t calling plays for the Eagles; instead, Delimitros has a locker room (actually, multiple locker rooms) to get ready and a team of players to make sure is fitted properly for equipment.
“Let’s see,” says Delimitros, the team’s vice president of equipment operations, in his offense in the vast equipment area attached to the team’s NovaCare Complex locker room. “We’re trying to stay two weeks ahead. Obviously, we’ve got our first preseason game to get ready for. We have a practice at the stadium and that’s its own little entity. Right now, Liverpool is using our locker room (at Lincoln Financial Field as they prepped for a “friendly” soccer game against Arsenal).
“We’re getting ready for the Baltimore game and that travel, so there is a lot of pre-prep that goes into that. Then we come back from that game and turn right around and go to New England for a joint practice and a preseason game. And then on top of that we are planning Brazil. We’ve got about 35,000 pounds of equipment and we have to have all of that documentation and have everything organized to send ahead of time on a cargo plane.”
Truth is, Brazil has been a project since April when a team of Eagles went there for a site visit and mapped out how to approach it.