Lifting Routine Question

So it seems that there a a fair number of people who know a lot about lifting on this site. I have a question about the purpose/benefits of a routine that I did in college. I was on a competitive athletic team (softball) and the first 2 weeks once the team started lifting were what we called two weeks of hell... It was 3 days a week m/w/f and we did three exercises at 10 reps continuously for five minutes, low weight as fast as we could. there were 4-5 different sets of this. For an example we would do weighted lunges (~35 lb sand bag) x 10 then inverted row x10 and back extensionx10 then repeat for 5 minutes
(and then have a 5 minute break while our partner did there time). It was only 2 weeks in the beginning of the year and I was wondering the purpose of that? We hated it...the running joke which was unfortunately true was we all had to use the handicap bathroom stall for those weeks and lever ourselves down and up. After those weeks we would more to more traditional strength programs, so I was wondering the point of those 2 weeks? Any trainers have an opinion on this? Thanks