University of North Carolina Athletics
Pace: Anatomy Of A Road Trip
November 18, 2002 | Football
Nov. 18, 2002
The following is an excerpt from Lee Pace's latest edition of Extra Points. To read more about the Florida State game, click here.
By Lee Pace
 Student managers Keith Hartley (L) and Brandon Wolfenbarger load the truck. |
Looking out the window of the Tar Heels' Delta charter flight Friday afternoon, Steinbacher spots four buses waiting on the tarmac at Tallahassee Regional Airport.
"Good," Steinbacher says. "Your worst nightmare -- the buses don't show."
Once a Tar Heel linebacker and now an associate athletic director for football operations, Steinbacher rides herd on umpteen details that must be attended to five or six times each fall when the Tar Heel football team takes to the road. It's a challenge of organization, attention to detail and quick reaction when things get loopy.
"My first game directing travel was the Oklahoma trip last year," Steinbacher says. "We had one bus break down and then a thunderstorm at the end of the game. Our plane couldn't get into Oklahoma City to pick us up, and I was trying to figure out where to find a hundred hotel rooms at midnight on a Saturday night. Fortunately, the weather broke and the plane got there. We had to wait about three hours."
The Tar Heels generally travel with 150 people -- about 75 players and an equal total of coaches, strength and conditioning staff, managers, trainers, video staff, ticket office staff, sports information officials, cheerleaders, broadcast crew members and athletic department officials.
Steinbacher carries a laminated page with him at all times with more than two dozen contact names and phone numbers -- including cell phones and pagers -- for key personnel with each of the team's many contractors and suppliers.
The team uses Delta Airlines' charter department, which has a number of jets dedicated each weekend to flying college and pro teams around the country. When the Tar Heels left Raleigh-Durham International about 1 p.m. on Friday, sitting on the tarmac alongside their jet was one to take N.C. State to Virginia another to take Duke to Atlanta. The Heels stay when possible at Marriott hotels, although their home base in Tallahassee was a Ramada Inn north of campus which all visiting teams use when playing FSU. Steinbacher hires a bus company locally to transport the team from Kenan Football Center to the airport and back, and then a bus company in the destination city to handle transportation there. Local police and/or state highway patrol agencies provide escorts through game-day traffic. Arrangements are made with a local multi-screen theater for the team to visit on Friday nights.
Katie Brown, a graduate student in athletic administration and an intern in the football office, travels to the game site a day before the team arrives to handle the detail work with each entity the team will encounter. She brings Carolina T-shirts and caps for hotel staff to wear, most of whom are happy to oblige a paying customer. She ensures that players' room phones are programmed to allow only local calls and that the hotel switchboard knows to reject any phone call to a players' room except one from his parents. Room service is advised of coach John Bunting's wish to have cappuccino delivered to his room at 8 a.m. The local newspaper knows to deliver a hundred extra papers on Saturday morning and leave one at each travel party doorstep.
Meanwhile, the equipment staff headed by Dominic Morelli and Jason Freeman is responsible for transporting the team uniforms and sundry accouterments such as the coaching staff's head phones and bad-weather gear. Carolina rents a 21-foot Ryder truck for all away games within a 12-hour drive of Chapel Hill. For trips longer than that, such as this year's visit to Arizona State, the equipment and managers travel on the team plane. Two athletic department staffers drive the truck, and the managerial staff of 11 (including eight student managers) splits up between two passenger vans. The truck left Chapel Hill around 7:15 p.m. Thursday, as soon as the last player dropped off his equipment bag for Saturday's game, and the managers left in tandem about 7:45. They drove through the night, arriving in Tallahassee Friday morning about 5:30 a.m. After napping for four hours, they met the truck at Doak Campbell Stadium and began preparing the visiting team locker room.
"If you can go about your business and no one notices you're there, it's a successful trip," says Freeman.
Tar Heels chow down: There's plenty of food but little fat. |
Strength and conditioning coach Jeff Connors has control of the travel menu, and gone are the days when buffalo wings and cheeseburgers were served on Friday nights before bedtime. The instructions Connors gives to the hotels are quite specific with high-carb, high-protein, low-fat foods. Friday night dinner, for example, includes marinated chicken breasts, roast white-meat turkey and lasagna made with low-fat ricotta cheese. No bacon or sausage is served at breakfast on Saturday -- only sausage made from turkey. The pre-game meal is built around chicken breasts, flank steak, spaghetti with marinara sauce and baked fish.
"We're trying to put the most efficient fuel in the kids we can," Connors says. "There's nothing healthy about loading them down with fat. We try for a mix of carbs and protein. The big thing years ago was to load up on carbs before competition. But new studies have shown a mixture of carbs and protein release energy more efficiently over time."
This weekend's trip flowed smoothly and without mishap -- save a curious security measure prior to boarding the buses after the game. Apparently terrorists had lodged random threats against sports teams in the state of Florida, so the four buses were ringed by dozens of uniformed officials prior to the team and staff boarding. Dogs sniffed every piece of luggage stowed underneath, and policemen searched every carry-on bag.
Oh, and a quick detail for Steinbacher's follow-up: Why was the driver on bus No. 4 piping through Silent Night on the sound system coming back from the airport?
