Traveling is part of life for college basketball teams -- and the beat writers that cover them. And sometimes it can get messy.
UConn was able to fly out of Houston on Sunday evening and land at Bradley airport around 10:30 p.m. Sure, they missed the Super Bowl, but they also just missed the snowstorm that hit the area hard.
The beat writers weren't as lucky. We all had flights cancelled on Monday. I had a 6 a.m. flight out of Houston, through Orlando, to Hartford, but my flight got banged in Orlando. So I was able to re-book on a flight from Orlando to Albany, then back to Baltimore and finally to Hartford. I considered exiting the plane in Albany, renting a car and driving back. But it was snowing pretty hard at the time (Monday, around 6 p.m.), so I stayed on the plane to Baltimore, crossing my fingers that the flight wouldn't get cancelled. It didn't, and I wound up landing at Bradley at 10 p.m.
A circuitous route, no doubt, and very little sleep from my 4 a.m. wake-up call to the time I arrived at my Southington home at about 11:15 p.m. But I was one of the lucky ones.
Ed Daigneault of the Waterbury Republican-American was stuck in Houston and didn't get back to Hartford until Tuesday at about 4:45 p.m.. Dom Amore of the Courant also was stuck in Houston and didn't get in until early Tuesday afternoon, then driving straight from the airport to Gampel for UConn's coach/player availability. Neill Ostrout of the J-I was one of the lucky ones -- he beat me to Bradley by a couple of hours on Monday night.
Anyway, you're probably not overly interested in the travel ordeals of beat writers. But travel has been an issue for UConn this season. Yes, the Huskies charter almost all of their flights, but they've logged a lot of air miles -- from California to Oklahoma to Texas to Florida to Puerto Rico, with trips to New Orleans, Dallas, Memphis and Greenville, N.C. still on the docket.
It's all a part of playing in the AAC, which doesn't make a whole lot of geographical sense.
To the Huskies' credit, they're not blaming their poor play as of late on travel fatigue:
But you've got to believe it's affected them -- or will affect them -- at some point.
I wonder where Leon Tolksdorf is when your team needs a valid shooting threat preecherman? Oh, I forgot yo sent his fine shooting form to Wash DC and yo scouted your remaining roster and could not wait to unleash yo premium, concept cars from your ten car garage. The fact is sleddogs have a 13 garage kennel. Who did you designate 11, 12 or 13? Was that answer a zero? Too bad.
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