Conference realignment has redefined 'travel ball'

The collapse of the Pac-12 began with an ambush.

As the Big Ten worked to finalize a TV deal already projected at $1 billion a year, the conference simultaneously engaged in clandestine talks with USC and UCLA in hopes of gaining leverage and extracting more money from potential broadcast partners.

USC and UCLA blindsided the Pac-12 in June 2022 when they bolted for the influx of cash and long-term stability the Big Ten could provide. Six more schools then bailed the following summer after the weakened Pac-12 failed to secure a media rights deal competitive with ones recently negotiated by other power conferences. By September 2023, Stanford and Cal also fled, voluntarily accepting drastically reduced revenue shares in return for a life preserver from the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The sudden breakup of a century-old Pac-12 serves as a reminder that student-athlete welfare is seldom the top priority in big-time college athletics. The pursuit of TV money almost always comes first, even if that means vaporizing cherished regional rivalries, ushering in an era of bicoastal conferences and placing an unnecessary travel burden on already overextended athletes.

While TV networks and streaming platforms may determine a school’s worth by the strength of its brand and how many viewers watch its football games, the Pac-12’s demise impacts more than just the sport that generates the most revenue. Conference realignment, to put it bluntly, has redefined the term "travel ball," doubling and in some cases tripling conference travel for less visible sports, none more so than women's volleyball, whose players will spend the most time on airplanes, miss the most classes and deal with the most fatigue and jet lag.

No former Pac-12 schools are more of a geographic misfit in their new leagues than Stanford and Cal in the ACC. Fifteen of the ACC’s 16 other schools are located in the Eastern Time Zone. Of those, Notre Dame and Louisville are the closest to Stanford and Cal at a distance of at least 2,200 miles away.

In Year 1 as a member of the ACC, the Stanford women’s volleyball team will travel more than 33,700 miles by the end of the 2024-25 season, further than any other fall sports program in college athletics. The 25,000-plus miles that Stanford women’s volleyball will fly during ACC play alone is more than the circumference of the Earth. That’s about three times the distance that Stanford traveled during conference play last year in its final Pac-12 season.

“My United status is already Premier 1K,” Stanford women’s volleyball coach Kevin Hambly told Yahoo Sports with a chuckle. “I don’t know what tier is beyond that, but I think I’ve got a great shot.”

Last September, Hambly held a brainstorming session with his staff the morning after Stanford secured an invitation to join the ACC. He dedicated an entire whiteboard in his office to jotting down potential concerns or changes to consider.

At first, the challenge of preparing for 14 games in the Eastern or Central time zones seemed daunting to the two-time national champion coach. Did Stanford need to fly out a day early, Hambly wondered, to acclimate to Eastern time? Or stay on Eastern time even when they were in Palo Alto? How could he help his athletes get enough sleep yet still have time to do their schoolwork?

After nine months of meetings with medical experts, academic coordinators, sleep consultants and other campus specialists, Hambly came to the same conclusion that many other former Pac-12 women’s volleyball coaches have.

“Everyone was freaking out at first,” Hambly said, “but the more we’ve looked at it, the more it seems like it’s not as big a deal as we thought it would be.”

Bring on charter flights

Washington women’s volleyball coach Leslie Gabriel remembers exactly when she became more confident her team wouldn’t be at a disadvantage traveling more than 22,000 miles this season during Big Ten play. It was when her university agreed to splurge for occasional charter flights when necessary, a luxury the Huskies have enjoyed just a single time during Gabriel’s 23 years as a member of her alma mater’s coaching staff.

“You never know what your administration is going to say, but they’ve been great through this transition, letting us know that they understand the demands the travel will have on our team,” Gabriel told Yahoo Sports. “They want to help as much as they can with that.”

Washington plans to fly charter four times this season, mostly to or from Big Ten schools like Penn State or Wisconsin that aren’t close to a major airport with an assortment of direct flights to and from Seattle. That substantially reduces travel time and missed classes for the Huskies while also enabling them to sleep in their own beds on Sunday night at the end of every weekend road trip.

Fellow Big Ten newcomers USC and UCLA also intend to fly charter on legs of at least four women’s volleyball road trips this season, something the Los Angeles schools seldom did as members of the Pac-12. Stanford women’s volleyball will continue to charter selectively in the ACC just like it did previously in the Pac-12, according to Hambly.

“To get to Notre Dame or to get home from Louisville, there’s no straight shot, so we’ll end up chartering those,” Hambly said.” But to go to Miami, if we took a charter, it would actually take us longer than hopping on a big jet and flying straight there. So it’s a little more like, 'Hey, let’s look at the options and see what makes sense.'”

'No red-eyes'

To make travel easier in women’s volleyball and other Olympic sports that have more than one game in a week, the Big Ten and ACC adjusted their scheduling approach. A team that has a cross-country flight home might play its second game of a road trip on a Saturday night or a Sunday morning to ensure it can return home in time to get a full night’s sleep Sunday night.

Coaches appreciate those athlete-friendly tweaks because their greatest concern isn’t travel time. It’s traveling across time zones. Research by sleep specialists has shown that traveling east, in particular, can have an adverse impact on athletes’ performance because advancing the body clock is more difficult than delaying it.

Coaches at former Pac-12 women’s volleyball programs have all sorts of different strategies for how they intend to try to minimize this issue.

Whereas Washington would fly out Thursday for a typical Friday-Sunday two-game Pac-12 road trip, Gabriel is experimenting with departing a day earlier for Big Ten trips. She said the Huskies will arrive “late on a Wednesday night for a Friday game just so we can get a little bit acclimated to the time zone that we’re in.”

Washington players also practice in the morning this season and take classes that start at 11 a.m. PT or later. When the Huskies arrive home from a long road trip late Sunday night, Gabriel has the ability to cancel Monday morning practice, allow her team to sleep in and not have any of them miss class time.

When Stanford coaches first began studying flight options to ACC cities last year, women’s volleyball director of operations Shauna Smith made the mistake of mentioning a red-eye flight in passing to Hambly. He responded passionately by firing off a barrage of links to studies and articles illustrating that red-eyes are destructive to a team’s athletic performance.

“I feel bad,” Hambly said. “She’s like, ‘Got it, Kevin! All you had to say was no red-eyes.’”

What Stanford will do instead is try to acclimate players as quickly as possible to Eastern time by flying to ACC cities as early as possible on Thursday mornings. The theory is that if athletes are up at 5 a.m. PT to catch a 7 or 8 a.m. flight and they don’t take more than a brief nap on the plane, then they should be able to fall asleep by 10 or 11 p.m. ET that night.

“From everything our medical staff is saying, that should help us get on the schedule that we should be on,” Hambly said.

Time zone adjustments

Since former Pac-12 women’s volleyball programs in the Big Ten and ACC will travel at least 21,000 miles apiece during league play this season, coaches were mindful about their approach to non-conference scheduling.

USC only leaves Los Angeles for a single trip, an apparent attempt to keep athletes from getting travel-weary. UCLA, by contrast, has non-conference road trips scheduled to Atlanta, Knoxville (Tenn.), Fort Worth (Texas) and Northern California. That’s more than 12,000 miles of travel before Big Ten play even begins. The Bruins don’t play their home opener until Sept. 29 against Ohio State.

UCLA coach Alfee Reft explained to Yahoo sports that he felt comfortable challenging his team because he has “a pretty veteran group.” Reft views the non-conference season as the ideal time “to really iron out kinks with our travel and going through time zones.”

“What time of day do we practice?” Reft said. “When do we do film? What time are we getting to sleep so we can feel optimal for performance the next day? If we can get as much information about what travel looks like early on, then certainly we have a better shot of getting it right when we’re in Big Ten play.”

Midway through UCLA’s first non-league road trip of the season to Georgia Tech two weeks ago, Reft asked his captains for feedback. They warned him about holding team activities or film sessions that lasted until 8 p.m. ET. Those made it difficult for players to wind down, go through their pre-bedtime routines and fall asleep at a reasonable hour for the night before a game.

Since UCLA is on the quarter system and doesn’t start class until Sept. 22, Reft thought about having his team stay out East in between early-season trips to Atlanta and Knoxville. He ultimately decided against it but encouraged his players to try to wake up around 6 a.m. PT and get to bed early during their three days at home in Los Angeles.

“We don’t micromanage,” Reft said. “We make suggestions. But if I’m calling someone at 7:30 or 8 and they’re not awake yet, that’s when it’s like, 'You might want to be up already.'”

Only one women’s volleyball program has a long history of overcoming regular 2,500-mile flights across time zones. These trips have long been reality for the University of Hawaii, which plays every Big West conference road game on the mainland.

Hawaii assistant coach Kaleo Baxter told Yahoo Sports that a few coaching colleagues reached out this past offseason to ask about the Rainbow Wahine’s approach to travel and how they still have so much success on the road. Baxter told them that Hawaii doesn’t have the resources to charter, so the coaching staff focuses on establishing routine and making players as comfortable as possible.

Before Friday-Saturday conference road trips, Hawaii practices Wednesday morning, leaves campus at noon and then takes an afternoon flight out of Honolulu. Hawaii players are required to go to bed by 11 p.m. PT during conference road trips and are woken up at 8 a.m. to take a team walk and have breakfast. The rest of the itinerary is set up to make it difficult for players to find time for more than a 30-minute nap the rest of the day.

“For the first year or two, it’s going to be quite an adjustment for these teams who aren’t used to traveling this much,” Baxter said. “It’s a drastic change, but all these coaches do a great job and I know they’ll have their teams ready for big matches.”

For months, Hambly talked about ACC travel at each of their weekly meetings and kept adding ideas to his office whiteboard for how to ease the transition. Finally, in August, Hambly erased the board. He felt comfortable Stanford had a good preseason plan in place.

“People think I’m nuts,” Hambly said. “They’re like, ‘Why are you not worried about it?’ But it’s problem-solving, and it seems like it’s not as big a problem as we first thought it would be."

Also cautiously optimistic is Gabriel, the Washington coach.

“This year is going to be a good learning year,” she said. “Afterward, we’ll be able to say how much this affects us and what we would change. My gut instinct is that maybe it’s been overblown, but I don’t think we’ll really know the toll it will take on us until we go through a year.”