Multiple Tufts Lacrosse Players Were Hospitalized After A Navy SEAL Training Workout Went Too Far
Larry French. Getty Images.The Tufts Jumbos are coming off a DIII National Championship in 2024. The boys are back on campus and gearing up for the 2025 season coming up this spring. Now the thing about DIII lacrosse is that there are only so many times you're allowed to practice as a full team with your coach there. The intent there is to make sure that DIII athletics don't become as much of a grind as DI sports are, and allow the student-athletes some time away from the sport. But that's just not the way it works since teams ends up having a bunch of "optional" captain's practices instead to work around the rule.
One of those "optional" captain's practices this fall was a workout led by a Tufts alum who went through some BUD/S Navy SEAL training program. It was a 45-minute workout that ended up with 12/50 players in the hospital.
Boston.com -- Five Tufts University lacrosse players were still hospitalized as of Friday, days after a dozen athletes were injured following a workout led by a Tufts and Navy SEAL training program alumnus, a spokesperson said.
Patrick Collins, a spokesperson for the university, said 12 members of the men’s lacrosse team were diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, or rhabdo, which is a life-threatening condition after a workout on Monday.
…Collins said 50 people participated in the 45-minute workout on Monday on campus, which was led by the alumnus who is a recent graduate of the BUD/S Navy SEAL training program. Collins called the workout “voluntary” and “supervised.”
BUD/S Navy SEAL, short for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, is a 56-week, multi-stage initial training program for Navy SEAL candidates, according to the Navy. The training “is designed to push you to your physical and mental limits,” according to the website.
Over the years it seems like it's been getting increasingly popular for sports teams to do a couple days of Navy SEAL training as a way to prepare for their season. Athletics have this really bad habit of comparing their sport to war. You'll always hear coaches say stuff about "going to battle" and shit like that. And while there might be a few traits that crossover between athletics and war, the two are as comparable as dollar store ground beef and a 45-day dry aged ribeye. Similar enough that you could kinda sorta see a resemblance if you really tried, by wildly different in every way imaginable.
Now as someone who also played DIII lacrosse and had Navy SEALs come in and put us through a couple days of workouts, I feel like I have the ability to speak on this. And all I have to say is…it’s just DIII lacrosse, man. I mean, sure, Tufts is as good as it gets in DIII lacrosse. But at the end of the day, it's just DIII lacrosse. Most of us were the 4th best player on our high school team. If you're at Tufts and were the best player on your high school team, it's most likely because your high school team just wasn't very good. Fact of the matter is that maybe we don’t need to train for Fallujah if we're just going to play a game in front of 34 parents and maybe a girlfriend or two.
This isn't Tiger Woods pushing his physical and mental capabilities to the limit in order to be the greatest golfer on the planet. These are bunch of dudes who are a year or two away from playing men's league. There's just no situation where DIII lacrosse players need to be worked to the point of their muscles breaking down into their blood due to overexertion. Just do some sprints, a few sets on the bench, go out and shoot a bucket of 100 balls, rinse and repeat. That's the moral of the story here. Stop training for a battle field if the field you're playing on has a logo in the center of it.
Here's to hoping the 5 players who were still in the hospital as of Friday made a full recovery and are out now. And here's to hoping whoever led that workout never gets hired by another team again.