UUPer Mike Whitlock didn’t bat an eyelash at the request.

This time, the New York Jets needed a helicopter.

The team, which held its first-ever summer training camp at SUNY Cortland, wanted the chopper to hover over and dry out their rain-soaked sod playing field, which the team spent weeks building on campus behind Cortland Stadium. Welcome to Day 3 of training camp.

“I told them ‘I’ll get a helicopter,’” said Whitlock matter-of-factly.

It was just another day at the office for Whitlock, the college’s director of student activities and conferences and liaison to the Jets, who worked for months with more than a dozen other UUPers to prepare for the team’s summer stay. In April, the Jets announced they were moving summer training camp to SUNY Cortland after holding it at Hofstra University for the last 41 years. The Jets were at Cortland from July 31 to Aug. 21.

From sanitizing bathrooms and locker rooms to supervising security and dealing with the thousands of fans who watched the Jets practice, SUNY Cortland UUPers played a big role in making training camp a success.

“UUPers have been involved in all different areas— facilities, housing, telecommunications, communications, athletic training, security, operations, computers, building and grounds and transportation,” said UUPer Peter Koryzno, Cortland’s director of public communications. “We worked as a team to make sure it came off as good as it could be.”

Koryzno, sporting a New York Jets polo-style shirt and khaki shorts on a steamy morning a few days after training camp began, smiled as he watched Jets kicker Jay Feely put one between the uprights. Across the way, Jets rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez and Kellen Clemens, last year’s second-string quarterback, ran pass patterns with wide receivers.

Like the New York Giants, who have trained at UAlbany since 1996, the Jets came upstate to escape downstate distractions. Rex Ryan, the Jets’ new coach, wanted a secluded spot away from Manhattan and the Meadowlands where the team could focus on football, Koryzno explained. Cortland’s facilities and willingness to host the team made it a good choice.

The Jets seemed to agree.

“The city of Cortland has worked out tremendously,” Jets wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery said in an August interview on the Jets’ Web site, www.new yorkjets.com. We’ve had a lot of time to spend with each other as a team.”

“I expected, when we came up to Cortland, for the team to bond and learn about each other,” Ryan told the Cortland Standard in August. “All we have here is football and each other, and I think it’s worked. We’ll see.”

There was much more than football to deal with for many Cortland UUPers, who worked closely with Jets staff every day during training camp and, in some cases, were available around-the-clock for the Jets to call on.

For Whitlock, making the Jets at home meant everything from providing office space, phone and computer hook-ups for the Jets’ front office personnel to accommodating Ryan’s last-minute call to have his nephew bunk in with him and his son in the same room.

“The blessing is we’ve put together a wonderful team of people,” Whitlock said. “Regardless of the need, our first answer is ‘let’s do it.’”

UUPer David Horrocks can attest to that. Horrocks, who heads the college’s building and grounds department and oversees its custodial staff, had his work cut out for him: preparing more than 100 dorm rooms and providing daily housekeeping service for Jets players, coaches and office staff.

The Jets required Cortland custodians to clean players’ bathrooms to hospital grade sanitation standards—which took staffers about an hour per bathroom to accomplish —to protect against MRSA and other easily spread viruses.

Horrocks said it took 22 hours for a dozen men to clean the locker room in preparation for the Jets’ arrival. During camp, 12 men worked full-time scrubbing and sanitizing the locker and weight rooms, which had to be cleansed before and after practices—a tough task when the Jets were doing twice daily drills mornings and afternoons.

All this was going on, of course, during a busy time for the custodial staff. Summer is when the school’s classrooms, dorms and cafeterias are cleaned to prepare for the upcoming school year. Cortland staffers had exactly 10 days to get the college ready for students, who started classes Aug. 31.

“They’ve been really good to work with,” Horrocks said of the Jets “Still, I’ve had a number of sleepless nights because there are so many details.”

Outdoors, Cortland UUPers—with the help of CSEA and PEF-represented staffers—set up hundreds of bicycle barricades and about a mile’s worth of orange plastic snow fence to cordon off players’ and press parking areas and a bleachers area where as many as 2,500 fans a day watched the players work.

UUPer Mark DePaull, Cortland’s assistant chief of campus police, oversaw more than 40 parking lot volunteers. Campus police also provided security for players and Jets staff; DePaull ran the operation from a command post near the Jets practice field.

“It’s been a challenge, but it’s a good challenge,” said DePaull.

— Michael Lisi

In January, four UUPers and a local businessman met with Republican state Sen. James Seward to highlight the union’s legislative agenda. They stressed that SUNY cannot weather any further budget cuts without jeopardizing student access and the high-quality public education New Yorkers rely on.

“Sen. Seward seemed to understand the general impact of the cuts to SUNY and expressed concern” with a number of the governor’s proposals, said Cortland UUPer David Ritchie. Ritchie was joined by fellow unionists Jamie Dangler, Craig Little and Dawn Van Hall, and King’s Den hair salon owner John Wetherell.

According to Ritchie, Sen. Seward said he doubts the Legislature will support the proposal to eliminate the 3 percent salary increase previously negotiated by the state’s public employees unions. UUPers expect to see that raise July 2 or Sept. 1.

“We used this opportunity to make sure Sen. Seward understood the full scope of the issues and UUP’s positions on them,” Dangler said. “I think it is important for legislators to get information from us. We work here and devote a huge portion of our lives to educating students and to fulfilling the broader mission of SUNY. People outside the institution don’t have the ability to see the things we do.”

— Karen L. Mattison

Nagel

Porter Lewis