{"id":208793,"date":"2025-10-08T09:55:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T09:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/208793\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T09:55:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T09:55:15","slug":"lessons-for-acc-1st-run-with-coast-to-coast-league-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/208793\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons for ACC 1st run with coast-to-coast league travel"},"content":{"rendered":"

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) \u2014 Ask California women’s coach Charmin Smith about her team’s first run\u00a0of cross-country travel for Atlantic Coast Conference games<\/a>\u00a0last year, and she’ll shrug off the challenges of doing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in the ACC, we\u2019re happy to be in the ACC,\u201d she said Tuesday during the league’s preseason media days. “And we get on a plane and we go.\u201d<\/p>\n

What You Need To Know<\/p>\n

Atlantic Coast Conference men’s and women’s basketball teams will have a second year of cross-country travel since the league expanded with additions of Stanford, California and SMU
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This year will offer the chance to make changes to how teams approach flying across all four U.S. continental time zones
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California women’s basketball coach Charmin Smith says she changed the team’s practice schedule around travel
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The Stanford men’s and women’s teams will use a bigger plane instead of having to stop to refuel<\/p>\n

Still, the league’s expansion to stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic coastlines last year,\u00a0along with a similar change in the Big Ten<\/a>, led to lots of flight hours, airborne study halls and sleep-altering routines as men’s and women’s teams criss-crossed the country. The losses piled up at a much higher rate than other road games in both leagues, too. And the challenges were acute for teams like California and Stanford as the ACC’s western outposts, forced to cross all four continental U.S. time zones multiple times in the same season.<\/p>\n

So Year 2 in this 18-team configuration means a chance for the Bears and Cardinal men’s and women’s basketball teams to tweak their travel approaches, as well as giving a second wave of Eastern-footprint programs their first taste of journeying a very long road.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s just something we can’t change,\u201d Stanford men’s coach Kyle Smith said with a chuckle. \u201cWe can’t move the school closer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Losses accumulate<\/p>\n

The league revamped its scheduling model with the arrivals of Cal and Stanford, along with SMU, to have teams making the long trip play twice on the same outing. That typically meant men’s teams would cross the country to play a Wednesday-Saturday set, while the women followed a Thursday-Sunday model.<\/p>\n

It’s been a tough ask.<\/p>\n

ACC women’s teams crossing between the Eastern and Pacific U.S. time zones went just 7-23 \u2014 a 23.3% win rate far lower than that of all other league road games (67-65, .508).<\/p>\n

It was worse on the men’s side, with teams going just 6-26 (18.8%) in road games when crossing all four U.S. continental time zones compared with 61-87 (41.2%) in all other league road games.<\/p>\n

Neither Cal nor Stanford won both games on a single men’s or women’s trip east, while only the North Carolina women and Wake Forest men managed to sweep the Bears and Cardinal on the same trip.<\/p>\n

The Big Ten’s expansion to add USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington also produced shaky records, even as Cardinal men’s guard Benny Gealer quipped that his Stanford education taught him that the one-year sample size was \u201cmuch too small.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you ran a regression over 10 years, I don’t know how long this will last,” Gealer chuckled. \u201cIt’s a challenge like anything. It’s a road game. We struggled on the road. I don’t weigh that because we had to travel a lot. I say that because it’s hard to win on the road in the ACC.”<\/p>\n

Changing logistics<\/p>\n

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said the league has been examining the travel question, too, down to everything from TV and tipoff times.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don’t have a lot of data points. We have one year,” Phillips said. “We feel in talking to the coaches, that has been a learning curve for everybody about how you should travel. No one has done it. Until you do it, you can’t adjust one way or the other on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Charmin\u00a0Smith tinkered with her plans last year, following player feedback by leaving earlier the day before the game so the team could practice after flying out rather than before leaving campus.<\/p>\n

Or why Stanford women’s coach Kate Paye is altering her schedule to go out the day before a game instead of two days earlier, saying she thought the long stints away from home had a \u201ccumulative effect.”<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was brand new,\u201d Paye said Monday. \u201cYou make the best choices you can. But again, experience is the best teacher.”<\/p>\n

Both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s Cardinal programs will also use a bigger charter plane this year to avoid having to stop to refuel, with Kyle Smith noting: \u201cGetting home nonstop is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur guys never really complained about it,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cI just sell them on, \u2018Look, we get to do it, you play in the ACC, you\u2019re going to Stanford and you’re getting paid. And it’s pretty awesome.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Heading west<\/p>\n

For the Eastern-footprint teams, that challenge comes only every other year. Yet it’s still something that teams are thinking about, some more than others.<\/p>\n

Clemson women’s coach Shawn Poppie also hasn’t settled on firm plans for the Tigers’ trip to Cal on Feb. 26 and Stanford on March 1. He said the team played two games at last December’s San Diego Invitational as a trial run for a cross-country ACC trip, and he’ll also try to pick up tips from Brad Brownell’s men’s team when they play at Stanford and Cal in early February.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat’ll be kind of the last piece of the experiment before we truly decide what to do,\u201d Poppie said. \u201cI think it\u2019s just tough regardless. I don\u2019t think you can make it a bigger deal than what it already is. If you do, then are you just getting in your own way?\u201d<\/p>\n

Louisville women\u2019s coach Jeff Walz\u2019s team plays at Stanford on Jan. 29 and at Cal on Feb. 1. He joked that he\u2019s ruled out taking a bus, adding: \u201cWe were trying to see how many national parks we could stop at on the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Louisville sophomore guard Tajianna Roberts is looking forward to the trip, at least. Her hometown is San Diego and she’ll be able to play in front of family.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s going to be an adjustment for sure,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cBut I think if we eat right, sleep right, we’ll be OK.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) \u2014 Ask California women’s coach Charmin Smith about her team’s first run\u00a0of cross-country travel for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[41443,41445,2724,402,1976,4044,398,400,401,2256,99],"class_list":["post-208793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-app-college-sports","tag-app-sports","tag-associated-press","tag-basketball","tag-college","tag-college-basketball","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-north-carolina","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}