Seahawks end Cheney ties
The Seattle Seahawks have held their last training camp practice at Eastern Washington University.
The NFL team, which was expected to train in Cheney for the last time this summer, plans on practicing instead in Kirkland, mainly because it will be playing a preseason game against New England in Beijing on Aug. 9.
“The logistics with getting over to China and doing that from Cheney would have been very difficult. It will be difficult enough to do from over here,” team president Tim Ruskell said. “And we have a new facility coming on line (in Renton) in 2008. Putting those two factors together, it made sense to work it out that we stay here this summer.”
The Seahawks have trained at EWU since 1997 and also from 1976 to 1985, but they announced plans last summer to build new team headquarters on 20 acres near the Renton waterfront. Seattle will hold training camp at the new facility, which will replace the current team offices in Kirkland, in 2008. Camp was at Kirkland from 1986 to 1996.
The Seahawks and Patriots will play their preseason opener Aug. 2 in Seattle prior to both teams departing for Beijing. Seattle, which will make five East Coast trips during the regular season, has asked the NFL to schedule its ensuing game on Aug. 19 to allow players more time to recover from the trip.
“We’re trying to get a cushion there,” Ruskell said. “When we talked to the teams that had done something like this, and we’ve done the Japan trip in this organization, the thing people said is that you need a little more time to recover and don’t just go back to practice. Those teams felt they got behind and had some trouble catching up.”
A 2002 economic impact study estimated that the team and its fans pump $2 million annually into the region. Seattle paid EWU nearly $1 million over the last three years to train in Cheney. The contract expired after the 2006 camp.
“From a university standpoint, their reasons make total sense,” EWU spokesman Dave Meany said. “We’d love to have them one more year, but as far as Eastern Washington University is concerned they’ve been great partners to us and the surrounding community.”
Meany said EWU hopes to “fill that time with other sports camps and we look at it as an opportunity to expose the university to different high school kids.”
Ruskell said the trend in the NFL is for teams to bring training camp closer to home.
“It used to be everybody left for camp and then came back,” he said. “Now it’s about 50 percent with a base at home or in close proximity. It was probably inevitable, but it’s been a great run and great team history at Eastern and we don’t want to forget that.
“I’ve heard a lot of stories about camp. My two camps were fantastic and people bent over backwards to make us feel so welcome. It’s been a great relationship and it always will be.”