Going the distance: How the University of Iowa transports its athletes across the country to compete

Getting to State College, Pa., can be a major hassle.

“You’re at the mercy of the schedules of the airlines,” said Ryan Ruckdaschel. “We could not find a flight with more than 20 seats out of any Midwest airport.”

Mr. Ruckdaschel, director of operations for the University of Iowa’s women’s gymnastics team, needed about two dozen seats for the squad’s Feb. 24 meet at Penn State. State College, located nearly in the middle of Pennsylvania, is 140 miles from Pittsburgh, 200 from Philadelphia. The four daily flights from Chicago to State College Regional Airport arrive between 5 and 9:30 p.m., with the latest Chicago departure at 5:40 p.m.

“It was weeks of trying to dig into any possible way we could get to State College,” Mr. Ruckdaschel said. “It was two planes and a three-hour bus ride.”

Those factors led to a rare charter flight for the gymnastics team.

“That’s a $50,000 plane ride, three to four times more expensive than flying commercially,” he said. “It was awesome for us. It made it so much easier. We were able to leave when we wanted, we were able to return when we wanted.”

The charter allowed the team to be back in Iowa City for Monday classes, a critical consideration in travel planning for any college sports team.

“It’s easier to get from here to Rutgers than it is to get from here to State College,” said Matthew Meyer. “All of that goes into account. The size of the planes matter, too.”

“It depends on the team, it depends where they’re going (and) the ease of travel versus student-athlete well-being,” said Laura Alderson. “We look at the price of a commercial flight charter versus the cost of a charter versus getting student athletes home at 3 in the morning.”

Working out of an office at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, Mr. Meyer and Ms. Alderson are Iowa’s agents with Anthony Travel, the national agency specializing in college sports travel. The Dallas-based company founded in 1989 handles flights, hotels, and other details for more than 100 schools. 

“We have all the varsity team travel, coaches’ travel when they go recruiting, when recruits come to campus, any special guests the athletic department brings in,” said Mr. Meyer.

The price of travel

With about 120 players, coaches, trainers, and other staff, football brings the largest traveling party to away games, and is the only team that routinely charters, according to Ms. Alderson. 

A self-sustaining auxiliary enterprise, the athletics department receives no funding from the general university budget. The university’s current $129 million athletics budget is 10 percent more than FY 2022’s “and places the budget at a pre-COVID operating level,” according to the Board of Regents’ annual budget report. 

The department is funded through ticket sales, broadcasting rights, and other sports-generated revenue. The university will spend just over $8.3 million on travel in the current fiscal year ending June 30, according to the regents’ budget.

When the football team last traveled to Columbus to play Ohio State in October 2022, the tab for the Hawkeyes’ 54-10 loss came to $196,413.55. It adds up:

• $79,725 for the chartered flight
• $6,440 for bus transportation to and from The Eastern Iowa Airport
• $14,300 for ground transportation in Columbus
• $4,377.60 at Chick-Fil-A
• $6,857 for catering by City Barbeque in Columbus

Logistical challenges like the gymnastics team’s are managed by each program’s operations director working with Ms. Alderson and Mr. Meyer. The process begins when the conference releases the season schedules.

“That’s the people we work with the most,” Mr. Meyer said. “They usually know before it fully gets released on the website, so they can give us a little bit of a heads-up.”

“They release the schedule, we do a team travel meeting with them,” Ms. Alderson said. “For a lot of our sports, the Big Ten schedule is sometimes the easier one to plan, if there’s not a (conflicting) citywide event like football. We’ll start at the beginning: flights, hotels, buses.”

“We don’t just spend to spend,” said Kyle Denning, operations director for men’s basketball. “We spend where it makes sense. We always bus to Wisconsin. With Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, and Northwestern, it’ll depend on when the game is.”

Class attendance a concern

The NCAA doesn’t directly regulate how much class time student athletes are allowed to miss, although conflicts between practices and classes are banned. The Big Ten requires member schools to set their own standards, and Iowa limits its athletes to eight missed classes per semester, according to Senior Associate Athletic Director Lyla Clerry.

Ms. Clerry said student athletes are “strategic in scheduling” classes during their seasons, coordinating class time with their sports schedule.

“Our students have priority registration,” she said. “They register knowing if they’re going to be traveling Fridays and returning Mondays.”

“If the guys don’t have to be back to class the next day, we may fly one way and bus home,” Mr. Denning said. “We’ll bus home Saturday after the game. You look at the schedule and see where it makes sense to save money, but also put the guys in a position where they can succeed academically.”

“We usually leave Thursday morning and are gone all weekend and get back Sunday night,” said Sarah Humphries, operations director for field hockey. About 30 people typically travel on road trips during their August-November season, usually on scheduled flights. The field hockey team’s October 2022 trip to State College cost $83,136.03.

“We will bus to Northwestern, and when we go to Louisville and Indiana we will bus,” Ms. Humphries said.

Equipment makes the trips, too. The football team leases a tractor-trailer rig to move uniforms, practice equipment, and other gear during the season. Baseball hires a van and driver for its gear, Mr. Meyer said, and rowing maintains a trailer for its sculls and shells. Tennis, golf, swimming, and gymnastics team members can carry their equipment via checked baggage, but other sports have unique demands.

“Track, sometimes they’ll ship their poles and their shotputs,” Ms. Alderson said. “They fly Southwest a lot, because Southwest kind of caters to sports teams and will accommodate poles. Other airlines do not.”

The Big Ten

Along with coaches and school officials, Ms. Alderson and Mr. Meyer are waiting for the first official schedules of an expanded Big Ten. The conference announced last August that Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC will join the Big Ten this fall, creating a coast-to-coast conference.

“We try to be proactive, but there’s only so much you can do,” Mr. Meyer said. “We work really closely with the different directors of operations for the teams. They usually know before it fully gets released on the website, so they can give us a little bit of a heads-up.”

“The goal is that each sport program would go out west only once a year,” Ms. Clerry said. “Most of our teams have gone out west to non-conference games. They’re still making that trip out west, but now it becomes a conference trip.”

The expansion is likely to mean more charter flights, though.

“A lot of those teams have to be back in class on Monday, so we typically want the latest flight out of wherever they are,” Ms. Alderson said. “Baseball’s done at 3:00, so they can catch a 6 p.m. flight. Those don’t exist coming from the California schools. Your latest flight right now is at 2:00, maybe.”

It’s not an issue for field hockey because none of the new Big Ten schools field squads, Ms. Humphries said. Mr. Ruckdaschel noted the new schedule is more of a logistical issue for schools on either coast. Of the four new schools, only Washington and UCLA have gymnastics programs.

“The bigger issue is for those teams,” he said. “To ask them to go all the way to Rutgers over two, three time zones, I think they have a challenge.”