ORLANDO (UCFKnights.com) -- Mid-September weeks for college football teams are usually pretty standard. Practice Monday through Thursday, a walk-through Friday and a game on Saturday. This past week was anything but normal for the Knights, but they made the best of if.
After the previous week's game vs. Memphis had been postponed, this week's game vs. Georgia Tech was impacted by a number of factors in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. So, head coach Scott Frost and his team decided to give back to their community.
On Tuesday, the Knights served meals to more than 100 National Guard members at the recruiting lounge at Spectrum Stadium. The Army National Guard staged more than 1,000 troops and nearly 300 vehicles at and around the stadium over the past week. Troops were sleeping in Nicholson Fieldhouse, utilizing the recruiting lounge for meals, using both the home and visiting locker rooms at Spectrum Stadium for shower and bathroom facilities and holding meetings in the Roth Tower club.
"Our players serving them makes this whole thing a little piece of something we can do for people who are giving a lot to people who have lost a lot," Frost said during the meal his team served to the National Guard troops. "It puts football in perspective when something like this happens, because we see how many people's lives are affected. Football is a very small piece of the equation when something serious like this happens."
On Wednesday, the Knights gave back to their local community. Coach Frost and a group of UCF football players headed to Seminole County and packed sandbags to help control the flooding that is still affecting the area. Another group of Knights headed into Orlando to work at the Second Harvest Food Bank.
Seminole County officials were expecting the worst flooding in the county since Hurricane Fay. Earlier in the week, nearly 50 percent of the county was without power. Many lift stations are still without power. On Wednesday, the Knights packed some of the nearly 400,000 sandbags that were needed this week to help protect homes that had yet to flood.
At Second Harvest Food Bank, the Knights sorted meat, sorted dry goods and packed family boxes. The food bank has provided roughly 200,000 meals and more than 200,000 pounds of water to the Orlando and Central Florida community.
The Knights saw their week return to some normalcy on Thursday and Friday as they got back on the practice field. They will have this weekend off before going back to their standard weekly schedule on Monday in advance of the road game at Big Ten foe Maryland.
