San Diego anchor mocks Chargers’ training camp return: ‘A whole two days?’

Teams relocating often don’t leave a good taste in the cities they leave. That makes the decision by the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers to hold two days of their training camp in their former home of San Diego particularly unusual.

And that led to some mockery by 10News (the local ABC affiliate) anchor Kimberly Hunt Thursday:

There, after 10News sports director Ben Higgins teased his upcoming report on the Chargers’ training camp in town, Hunt said “A whole two days? All right. They wouldn’t want to push it.”

That’s quite the shade. But it’s also a relatively reasonable reaction from a San Diego media figure towards the Chargers given the local anger when that team left in 2017 (although many of their games have continued to air locally thanks to corporate decisions by CBS). And that’s before any consideration of Hunt’s marriage to Billy Ray Smith Jr., who played for the Chargers in San Diego in the 1980s and 1990s.

For the record, the Chargers also practiced in San Diego for one day last summer, holding that practice at the Marine Corps’ base at Camp Pendleton. And the decision to hold two days of practices in that city this year seems to have a lot to do with head coach Jim Harbaugh, as these practices will be at the University of San Diego’s stadium. Harbaugh started his head coaching career with the FCS-level Toreros, coaching there from 2004-06 before jumping to Stanford. He also played for the Chargers near the end of his career, starting 17 games for them over the 1999 and 2000 seasons.

It makes some sense for Harbaugh to boost a city he has history in and particularly a school where he got his head coaching start. But the Chargers’ brief return to a city they abandoned certainly isn’t going to win over everyone locally. And Hunt’s reaction here was an example of that.