The ACC's 1st run with Atlantic-to-Pacific league travel offers tweaks, lessons for Year 2

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Ask California women's coach Charmin Smith about her team's first run of cross-country travel for Atlantic Coast Conference games last year, and she'll shrug off the question about the challenges of doing it.

“We’re in the ACC, we’re happy to be in the ACC,” she said Tuesday during the league's preseason media days. "And we get on a plane and we go.”

Still, the league's expansion to stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic coastlines last year, along with a similar change in the Big Ten, 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 particularly acute for teams like California and Stanford as the ACC's western outposts, forced to cross all four continential U.S. time zones multiple times in the same season.

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 lengthy road.

“It's just something we can't change,” Stanford men's coach Kyle Smith said with a chuckle. “We can't move the school closer.”

The league revamped its scheduling model with the arrivals of Cal and Stanford, along with SMU, to have teams making the lengthy 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.

It's been a tough ask.

ACC women's teams crossing between the Eastern and Pacific U.S. time zones went just 7-23 — a 23.3% win percentage far lower than that of all other league road games (67-65, .508).

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 to 61-87 (41.2%) in all other league road games.

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.

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 “much too small.”

“If you ran a regression over 10 years, I don't know how long this will last," Gealer chuckled. “It'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."

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said the league has been examining the travel question, too, down to everything from TV and tipoff times.

“We don't have a lot of data points. We have one year," Phillips told The Associated Press. "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.”

That’s why Charmin Smith 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.

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 “cumulative effect."

“It was brand new,” Paye said Monday. “You make the best choices you can. But again, experience is the best teacher."

Both the men’s and women’s Cardinal programs will also use a bigger charter plane this year to avoid having to stop to refuel, with Kyle Smith noting: “Getting home nonstop is important.”

“Our guys never really complained about it,” he said, adding: “I just sell them on, ‘Look, we get to do it, you play in the ACC, you’re going to Stanford and you're getting paid. And it's pretty awesome.'”

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.

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's when they play at Stanford and Cal in early February.

“That'll be kind of the last piece of the experiment before we truly decide what to do,” Poppie said. “I think it’s just tough regardless. I don’t 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?”

Louisville women’s coach Jeff Walz’s team plays at Stanford on Jan. 29, followed by at Cal on Feb. 1. He joked simply that he’s ruled out taking a bus, adding: “We were trying to see how many national parks we could stop at on the way.”

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.

“It's going to be an adjustment for sure,” Roberts said. “But I think if we eat right, sleep right, we'll be OK.”

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