The Birds will be back in 2012.

The Philadelphia Eagles and Lehigh University today announced that they have signed a contract that will keep Eagles training camp at the school
during the summer of 2012.

Lehigh has been the summer home of the Eagles since 1996.

“I can’t say enough good things about our partnership with Lehigh
University,” said Eagles Chief Operating Officer Don Smolenski.

Today’s announcement was hardly a surprise. The Eagles said they would sign on for a 17th summer at Lehigh as this year’s training camp wrapped up in August.

Training camp dates for next year have yet to be set.

Smolenski noted that Lehigh’s flexibility during the lockout made a real difference for the Eagles.

“During the lockout this past off-season, they really worked well with us as we navigated through the uncertainty of the status of training camp.” he said. “Despite that uncertainty and the accelerated timeline of events, I’m proud to say they provided us with another summer of first-class accommodations.”

Lehigh Athletic Director Joe Sterrett is glad to have the Eagles back.

“We appreciate our partnership with the Eagles, which provides the
Lehigh community with national exposure and positive economic impact,” he said in a news release.

Greg Schulze looked around at the bleachers, fences and tents that make up the Philadelphia Eagles’ training camp base on Lehigh University’s Goodman Campus.

“Usually it takes us 15, 16 days to get this all up,” said Schulze, Lehigh’s director of athletic facilities and events/assistant athletic director. “This year we did it in eight.”

The summer of 2011 will be remembered around Lehigh as the year of doing things differently with the Eagles. With all the uncertainty surrounding the NFL lockout and when or if the Eagles would be making their annual flight north as they have every year since 1996, Lehigh and Eagles officials had to scramble to pull it off.

“We had to keep juggling things,” Schulze said. “We’d develop plans and then we’d have to totally revamp them. But when the dominoes started to fall we were in the right position.”

How well did Lehigh do?

Well enough that Schulze confirmed that the Eagles, very satisfied customers, will return in 2012. Well enough that one fan, John Granahan III of Green Lane, Pa., attending with his sons and his father, said, “I wouldn’t know what they could fix up any better.”

“Sure feels like they did a good job to me,” said Granahan’s father, also named John, who made two trips to Lehigh this summer and especially praised the team for the programs for children that his grandchildren, John, 11, and Sean, 9, enjoyed.

Well enough that rookie punter Chas Henry, who knows all about top-shelf facilities after kicking for Florida, said, “Everything was great up here. The security, the food, the dorms, everything was set up beautifully for us. I had a great experience up here.”

And well enough that coach Andy Reid saluted Schulze and his crew.

“I’d like to thank the people at Lehigh for the great job that they did,” he said. “Every year I say this, and it seems that every year they take it up another notch. They do a phenomenal job with their hospitality and working with us. We’ve had rain the past few days and working with us with their sports teams using the indoor facility. Again, just thank you to all of them.”

Sounds like Schulze and the Lehigh crew did just fine — but while everyone else enjoyed the setup, Schulze’s people paid a price.

“A lot longer days,” said Shulze assistant, Allen Biddinger. “Our phones were never off. You’d get calls late Friday for something they needed Saturday morning, text messages. There was a lot of communication back and forth. We used a lot more people and a lot more overtime.”

The needs of Schulze’s staff included obvious categories — groundskeepers and security — plus some less likely employees.

“Locksmiths,” said Biddinger, pointing to the A. Haigh Cundey Varsity House. “That whole building gets re-keyed for the Eagles and after.”

Schulze and his staff caught a slight break when the Eagles broke camp a day early, but the process of cleaning up and shutting down the Eagles camp leads directly into getting the campus ready for the Mountain Hawks’ own fall teams, all of whom are practicing already.

“It will take two days to take this all down,” said Jason Gall, another of Schulze’s assistants. “But that’s 40-50 people working straight through.”

There’s cleaning and scrubbing to be done — “tougher this year with all the mud and rain,” Schulze said — and taking the tents down can take a week as they need to dry out and be treated with care.

So is it worth it?

“I think so,” Schulze said. “The Eagles help us with the fields, which helps all of our teams. But also it provides Lehigh an opportunity to demonstrate that the whole Lehigh Valley is part of the Philadelphia area, one big megapolis, so to speak, that we’re not far away, ‘over the mountain.’ The Eagles provide a showcase for the Lehigh Valley.”

Maybe the best way to tell that Lehigh’s efforts pay off is to see the joy and delight on the faces of children like the Granahans.

“I liked it best when I got to shake my favorite player’s hand, Michael Vick,” Sean said.

That’s worth any number of days assembling bleachers and tents.

Philadelphia Eagles defensive tackle Mike Patterson has been taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest after collapsing today at a training camp practice at Lehigh University in Bethlehem.

Patterson is alert and communicative at the hospital after a seizure on the field, Eagles trainer Rick Burkholder said this morning. The seizure lasted four minutes, the trainer said.

“He’s absolutely alert, stable, totally communicating with everybody, even joking a little bit,” Burkholder said. “We won’t speculate what happened to him, other than he had a seizure. It could be anything. We don’t even want to speculate what might have happened.”

Patterson’s agent, JR Ricket, said in a statement that the player is “in no pain and doing well.”

“We are very grateful for everyone’s prayers and support,” he added. “Mike will be back at practice as soon as the doctors clear him.”

Patterson dropped to the ground as offensive and defensive linemen prepared for one-on-one drills this morning, and he began violently shaking. He was immediately tended to by Burkholder and his staff, with assistance from rookie offensive lineman Danny Watkins, a firefighter with EMT training.

“I’ve got to give Rick (Burkholder) and our doctors the credit,” head coach Andy Reid said. “During chaotic situations like that they all remain calm. I’m not a doctor or a trainer. The players aren’t. And that’s one of your toughest guys right there going down, so we were all on edge a little bit and Rick just calmed the situation down.”

As players knelt nearby, holding hands and praying, an ambulance arrived and Patterson was placed on a stretcher and lifted inside the vehicle. Watkins helped lift Patterson into the ambulance.

“You never want to see a teammate go down like that,” Watkins said later. “It’s not an easy thing to see. I’m sure any one of the other guys would have done the same thing (trying to help). My heart goes out to him. He went down and it’s hard to not jump in there and help the guy.”

Reid said he tried to step in as Watkins went to help.

“He wanted to jump right in there and Rick was stabilizing” Patterson, Reid said. “I kind of held him (Watkins) back a little bit, but his first reaction was to dive in.”

A Lehigh Valley Hospital spokesman confirmed Patterson was at the hospital but said all information on his condition must come from the Eagles.

Patterson, 27, was the Eagles’ first-round pick in 2005 out of USC. He’s started 84 games and played in 95, the most of anybody on the current roster.

Practice resumed after about 15 minutes.

UPDATE: Philadelphia Eagles defensive tackle Mike Patterson to remain in hospital overnight

PHILADELPHIA — Fresh off a season in which they won 10 games, captured the NFC East title, and found a new franchise quarterback in Michael Vick, the Eagles were more than pleased with Monday’s news that football is back.

“In the end, both sides gave enough to get the deal done, and we can all go back to work feeling good about what was accomplished,” Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said. “A 10-year contract is unprecedented in professional sports. By the time this contract ends, the NFL and its players will have been able to play 33 uninterrupted seasons of football.”

Philadelphia will hold training camp, as planned, at Lehigh University. The players will report on Wednesday. Camp will break at Lehigh on Aug. 17.

“I’m happy that the NFL and its players can get back doing what they love to do,” Eagles coach Andy Reid said. “The coaches can get back to coaching. Players can get back to playing and we’re all pleased about that.”

Philadelphia will play host to Baltimore in the preseason opener on Aug. 11 at Lincoln Financial Field.

“Like our fans, we’ve been waiting for this situation to end since the day it started. Now the challenge is getting back to the games with as little disruption as possible,” Eagles president Joe Banner said. “Even during the lockout, we kept working through the summer knowing we had to be ready for this moment – to go from zero to 100 mph overnight.

“That includes giving our fans a worthwhile preseason experience. So we kept working at it, even when we weren’t sure we would have time for training camp at all. We owe thanks to many people at Lehigh and on our Eagles staff for making that possible.”

As preparations continue for Lehigh, transactions will now take center stage, as the Eagles begin to ponder what the final roster might look like headed into the season opener at St. Louis on Sept. 11. Included in that, obviously, is the backup quarterback situation behind Vick. Will they trade Kevin Kolb? Will they acquire a veteran quarterback?

“We have to be quick learners, and quick to act,” Banner said. “We’re studying the new contract hard, so we can make good football decisions fast. We want to be on top of the nuances of this new agreement so we can help our ballclub compete.”

The decision to remain at Lehigh was a difficult one, as several other NFL teams, including the New York Jets and Giants, elected to cancel their college-based portions of camp to remain at their home facilities, given the time crunch.

“As far as our team, we look forward to reconvening in the near future and we are looking forward to holding training camp once again on the campus of Lehigh,” Reid said. “We understand that we have a lot of work ahead of us in order to get ready for the season opener at St. Louis.

“And I’m excited to get started on that as soon as we can.”

The NFL is back in business and the Philadelphia Eagles are winging their way to Lehigh for training camp.

NFL players agreed to a new 10-year contract on Monday after owners approved a deal last week.

For now, the Eagles’ players will show up on Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., and go through a walkthrough practice on Thursday.

Fans will probably see some players on the field on Friday, but it certainly won’t be the entire team.

One issue is that the Eagles can’t start signing rookies and draft picks until Tuesday. The team can also start trading players, like Kevin Kolb, on Tuesday.

But NFL teams won’t be able to sign veteran free agents until Friday at 6 p.m., so it will be days before a full squad can be assembled at Lehigh.

And it will be a squad with as many as 90 Eagles players for training camp.

One fan who was excited is Philadelphia Eagles’ head coach Andy Reid.

“As far as our team, we look forward to reconvening in the near future and we are looking forward to holding training camp once again on the campus of Lehigh University. We understand that we have a lot of work ahead of us in order to get ready for the season opener at St. Louis and I’m excited to get started on that as soon as we can,” Reid said in a statement.

Probably as excited are local business in the Lehigh Valley who cater to fans.