As football season draws closer, the Plymouth Fire and EMS Department is preparing to change a few of its staff duties in August.
The University of Notre Dame’s football team is less than two weeks away from hosting its training camp at Culver Military Academies. The annual excursion 45 minutes away from South Bend has played host to the camp for years.
Plymouth Fire Chief Rodney Miller says duties will be similar again this year.
“What we do is we staff an ambulance down there for anything that would be transported to South Bend,” says Miller. “Their team doctors are there and what not, so we would just be there for paramedic coverage.”
Camp runs August 6th through the 10th for about four hours each day.
Miller says he arranges duties for the staff to distribute the workload between Plymouth and the site of the camp. Players may suffer injury during drills, dehydration from the heat, or even concussions.
Notre Dame will return to South Bend following the excursion to Culver to complete their practice rounds prior to the start of the college football season. For their trouble, Plymouth will receive a bit of compensation for providing additional medical support.
“The monetary value is around $2,200 I think and normally we’ve just given them an invoice and then we deposit them into the city’s Monetary Gift Fund,” says Miller.
The Fire Chief joked that he’d be willing to sneak certain city officials into the site of the football facilities in Culver to observe camp.
Culver provides the fields, but is also able to provide sleeping arrangements and a dining hall sufficiently large to host the Fighting Irish football players.
