CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Brooke Demetre was ready to go.
The Stanford forward isn’t deterred by the idea of the cross-country travel that awaits the Cardinal and California men’s and women’s basketball teams in the newly expanded Atlantic Coast Conference. No, just like for this week’s flight to the state of North Carolina for the league’s preseason media days, she’ll have everything she’ll need to pass the time between homework and hobbies.
“I love crafts, and art,” she said with a laugh Wednesday. “So I love to paint, draw, crochet. And I have a bedazzling kit. So on the way here, I have this little mini-watercolor set. So I was painting on the plane ride over.”
OK, so the 6-foot-3 junior is set. But what about everybody else for the Cardinal or the Bears? Or, for that matter, the teams in the ACC’s eastern-seaboard footprint that will now have trips to the Golden State? The league’s expansion to 18 basketball programs, including the addition of SMU to plant the ACC’s flag in Texas, has turned what used to be largely regional tussles to determine a regular-season champion into a Pacific-to-Atlantic endeavor that changed the way the ACC handled scheduling.
This is the new realignment world of four superconferences, notably with the ACC joining the Big Ten — which added USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon from the Pac-12 — in taking on that coast-to-coast operation.
“I’m sure we’ll learn a lot,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told The Associated Press. “I don’t know that we’ve got it completely figured out, but we looked at it in a fair equitable way. …. I feel good about it. Is it perfect? It’s not perfect. But we needed to start somewhere and I feel like we’re at a good place going into Year 1.”
The league opened its “ACC Tipoff” preseason basketball media days Tuesday at the same Charlotte hotel that hosted its July football event, where coaches fielded questions about how they were planning to handle the first in-season trips of the expanded league. Yet that was with a manageable format of playing once per week.
Basketball season represents a bigger test with 20 games on the men’s slate, 18 for the women and multiple per week each way.
So the league has adopted a 2-for-1 approach to putting together the schedule: play two games for every one trip and essentially alternate weekends of playing at home versus on the road. That would have Stanford or Cal playing a pair of road games at neighboring North Carolina schools or in the Eastern time zone on the same trip, or each hosting the same visitor within a four-day span.
Five schools — Boston College, Florida State, Miami, N.C. State and Syracuse — will have both their men’s and women’s programs travel to California to play the Cardinal and Bears this season.
“It is what it is and you have to do it,” said N.C. State men’s coach Kevin Keatts, whose Wolfpack visits Cal on Feb. 5 and then Stanford on Feb. 8.
“We’ve got to schedule it right. We’ve got to travel right. We’ve got to maintain our academics, we’ve got to eat right and get the proper rest. But it’s a tough trip, especially when you haven’t done it before.”
Paul Brazeau, the league’s senior associate commissioner for men’s basketball, told the AP the approach was to largely keep those two games on a Wednesday-Saturday schedule, which would build in travel time before and rest between games that were reasonably close together geographically.
The other target was to ensure that teams returning from a cross-country trip were earmarked for a home game on their next game.
“We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a Miami-BC (doubleheader) for Stanford and Cal,” said Brazeau, referring to the roughly 1,500-mile separation between schools at the northern and southern extremes of the league’s eastern footprint.
Stanford men’s coach Kyle Smith, however, pointed out that it’s not an entirely new challenge. The first-year coach grew accustomed to long travel for league play during his time at Washington State in the Cardinal’s former Pac-12 home.
“When I was at Washington State, getting from Pullman to Tucson (Arizona) is a 14-hour trip,” Smith said.
The travel concerns aren’t as pressing for the Mustangs, whose men will travel from the central U.S. to California to round out the Cal and Stanford schedules as the next-closest league members. And Phillips noted programs like Georgia Tech and Louisville are closer to SMU than they are other longstanding ACC schools.
“Dallas is in a much better location,” SMU men’s coach Andy Enfield said. “We can go to everywhere within an hour-and-a-half, maybe two-hour flight, and then get back for class. The wear and tear on your bodies as student-athletes and coaching staff will be manageable at SMU.”
For the longer trips, the challenge will be for teams to stay hydrated, get enough rest and potentially receive treatment for aches and injuries.
To some, though, there are some benefits.
Demetre likes the idea of unplugging from social media and the rush of a hyperconnected world to focus on her classwork or her arts-and-crafts projects. First-year Cardinal coach Kate Paye, who is taking over for retired Hall of Famer Tara VanDerveer, shrugged off the added airmiles by saying it just means more time to “take a little longer nap and maybe watch one extra show on Netflix.”
For California forward Marta Suarez, the first taste of cross-country ACC travel to Charlotte for the media days felt “shorter and easier than I thought it would be.”
Maybe so, but that’s easy to say now in October. The feeling could be different as losses, injuries and frustrations mount for teams in the February grind.
“I feel like it’s an adventure,” said Suarez, a native of Spain who started her playing career at Tennessee.
“We’re just figuring out: ‘What games are we going to play? Somebody bring the Nintendo switch, somebody bring some cards.’ …. I wouldn’t say we’re worried as much as kind of like curious. Like, how is it going to work?”
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