CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — When Bill Belichick first stepped on campus as North Carolina’s football coach, he identified three things as the most important issues to address with school chancellor Lee Roberts: food, housing and parking.
UNC’s administration listened. Spots in the parking garage closest to Kenan Stadium were located for the team, queen-sized mattresses were fashioned in dorm rooms to fit larger-sized football players, and former New England Patriots chef Josh Grimes was hired to help feed the roster.
“You can train well when you can eat well, park close to where you’re working out and get a good night’s rest,” Belichick said Wednesday night on the first installment of the Carolina Football Live radio show to open the new season.
As part of Belichick’s debut appearance — and potentially the only one — on the weekly show with host Jones Angell, the coach talked about the emphasis UNC has made on improved nutrition and physical well-being ahead of this season. Along with praising Grimes’s efforts in the kitchen, Belichick also commended the work of Moses Cabrera, the Tar Heels’ performance coach for strength and conditioning. Together, the new hires have helped UNC’s roster lose a collective 160 pounds of fat and gain 462 pounds of muscle over a three-month period.
“Those are positive results that they want to continue to build on,” Belichick said Wednesday night. “They’re younger and they improve faster, but they’ve worked hard to make that improvement. So it’s been very gratifying to see them develop both physically and on the football field.”
Among the players who returned to UNC, personal testimonies of the increased intensity on conditioning under Belichick’s watch have confirmed the results. Returning players such as safety Will Hardy and receiver Jordan Shipp have revealed how surprised they were at the amount of running the Tar Heels did before training camp began in early August.
At the ACC Kickoff preseason event, Shipp and Hardy touched on a grueling summer training regimen called “bouts,” a running gauntlet consisting of timed 800-meter sprints, before finishing with route running as the players tired.
All the offseason work hasn’t just resulted in physical gains. On Wednesday, with the Tar Heels in game prep mode for the approaching season opener against TCU, Shipp opened up about the bonding influence this process has had in molding a roster with some 70 new faces.
“I definitely feel like we’re going to be the best-conditioned team in the country for sure,” Shipp said. “I feel like we had one of the hardest summers out of college teams.”
To fuel the players during conditioning, Grimes has worked alongside a revamped nutrition plan that Belichick and his staff have put in place. Using his eight-year experience with the Patriots, Grimes has “really helped a lot,” Belichick said Wednesday night. The head coach also mentioned that Grimes has been feeding other sports teams on UNC’s campus as well.
The emphasis on nutrition has been helpful for Carolina players like defensive lineman Leroy Jackson, who shared earlier in preseason camp how impactful a new diet has been for him.
“I have definitely noticed a lot with being leaner, actually eating right and taking the little things with my nutrition better,” Jackson said. “When they came in, it was great for all the players to be able to get the right things, what they needed. … Because with this new staff, it is a hard foundation. The standards are high, but we still have to take care of our bodies and one of those things is nutrition.”