I flew with Hawaii football to understand what cross-country travel is REALLY like

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We’re in a new era in college football, where cross country travel across multiple time zones is now a common occurrence, even for conference games.

Just this past week, Maryland flew all the way to Oregon (and lost), Washington flew all the way to Penn State (and lost), Iowa traveled all the way to UCLA (and lost), and Cal flew cross country to Wake Forest (and won….like you’d expect anything to make sense with Cal).

I’ve been covering college sports long enough to know that not all athletics travel is created equally, and that schlepping a group of 120+ people across the country is never easy. But it’s one thing to know that intellectually…it’s another thing to experience it firsthand.

So I did. Two weeks ago, while I was in Hawaii, I joined the Hawaii football team for their flight to the mainland to take on Fresno State on Nov 1. I wanted to understand what actually goes into team travel at that scale.

The journey from Hawaii to Fresno technically started on Thursday, but that was new. Previously, the Rainbow Warriors flew commercials, and started their road trips a day earlier. Now, the football team flies charter, just like virtually everybody else in FBS.

Athletic Director Craig Angelos told me he began evaluating Hawaii’s travel logistics after his first year on the job. “We found that if you charter, you don’t have to leave as early on the front end and you don’t always have to stay overnight after the game. Once we crunched the numbers, we found that chartering for all five football road trips saved about $70,000 a year.”

Charting flights isn’t just about saving money and increasing athlete comfort. It also dramatically reduces the time and complexity of transport, which means it limits the number of places where things could go wrong. Multiple Hawaii operations staffers told me that before chartering, the football team wouldn’t be able to get a commercial direct flight from Honolulu to Fresno.

That meant that the team would either fly into Sacramento (roughly 175 miles from Fresno State) or LAX (roughly 230 miles)…and then bus. The entire ordeal would easily take 12 hours.

Hawaii can’t charter for every single team in every single sport, but they can for football. So now, the team leaves on Thursday.

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