Photos: Central Michigan bowl practice, potato-packing power hour at Gleaner’s food bank

Detroit — Central Michigan’s football team spent much of Tuesday morning and afternoon hard at work, first practicing at Ford Field before packing potatoes at Gleaner’s Community Food Bank. 

Practice began at 10 a.m. on the Ford Field turf, running for approximately 80 minutes before bussing to Gleaner’s in nearby Taylor, Michigan, where an early afternoon of packing potatoes awaited — part of the GameAbove Sports Bowl’s programming for the Chippewas and Northwestern, and a way to give back to the local community hosting both teams. 

Mitten Football followed along, camera in tow and documented the day. 

All photos by Andrew Graham

Practice begins with stretching and dynamic warm ups before the team scatters to all corners of the field for position drills.

Eventually, the position drills give way to team settings, offense, defense, special teams and eventually 11 on 11.

Practice is kept light and energetic courtesy of student staffers operating a massive set of speakers on the sideline.

Eventually, practice winds down and the Chippewas change before bussing over to Gleaner's where thousands of potatoes awaited.

The task: Bagging potatoes, 10 per bag, for distribution to people in need across southeast Michigan. The added wrinkle? Competing against Northwestern to see which team could bag more potatoes.

While bagging and tying up the potatoes, and ensuring the correct count, was priority No. 1, two other tasks were key: Getting the bags opened for potatoes, and keeping tally of how many bags had been filled.

In the end, Central Michigan packed more potatoes than Northwestern, a good portent. As the Gleaner's staff shared, in recent years that's correlated with winning the game on Friday.

In any regard, the Chippewas headed off for some downtime after, and eventually headed to Top Golf that evening, capping off a busy Dec. 23 in Detroit.