Panthers forced indoors by rain

CHARLOTTE -- The rain chased the Carolina Panthers inside for another day Thursday.

After practicing Wednesday on an indoor soccer field at the Charlotte Sports Center off Harris Boulevard, the Panthers were there again Thursday preparing for Sunday's game against the Atlanta Falcons at Bank of America Stadium.

The Panthers - about 60 players accompanied by several coaches and team staff members - wedged themselves onto the 72 X 32-yard, artificial-turf field for two hours.

Carolina is among the NFL's few remaining franchises without its own indoor facility - one that's big enough to house at least one full-sized field and with a ceiling high-enough to contain punts, kicks and long passes.

It will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Team spokesman Charlie Dayton said Thursday that inclement weather is infrequent enough that the team has never seriously considered building an indoor facility.

But this week, as the rain fell relentlessly for most of two days, the Panthers did the best they could with what they had, boarding three buses and traveling about 10 minutes up Interstate 77 to the sports center.

"The facility allows us to go through the mechanics and operations of [the] game plan," receiver Muhsin Muhammad said. "You still get full movement. You can't throw the deep ball ... but I think you still can get in good work."

But without the wide-open spaces of a 100-yard field, movement is still constricted.

"For me, it's conditioning," linebacker Jon Beason said. "At practice, you want to go out there and run hard, get your wind right for the game. That allows you to play faster and longer.

"But I think the coaches did a good job making it realistic for what it was."

The Panthers don't always go to the sports center when it rains. They have also used one of the stadium's concourses, where they can walk through plays but not much else.

With a younger team than he's had in the past, however, Fox wasn't comfortable doing that this week.

"Last year, with more of a veteran team, we could do a bit more with the option [on the concourse]," he said. "This year, with us being younger, we've got more guys who we have to train and give more [repetitions] to. So it's more viable to go to the center this year."

The practices at the center are also filmed, which isn't the case on the concourse.

"We're just walking through [at the stadium]," Muhammad said. "We can't watch any film and you can't critique."

Thursday amounted to a day off for punter Jason Baker, whose ability to practice was severely limited by the center's 46-foot ceiling.

"It's rest you don't normally get," said Baker. "That's a huge positive on Sundays. It's not ideal, but that is the plus to it. So, no complaints here."

Indoor facilities are commonplace in the league's cold-weather cities, but many teams in warmer parts of the country - including Atlanta, Tennessee and New Orleans - have them so they can practice when it rains or is unusually hot outside.