Playing football this season for the U.C.L.A. Bruins means being a frequent (and distant) flier. The team began the campaign in August with a win at the University of Hawaii. Their next road games sent the Bruins to Louisiana State, then Penn State, and back across the country to Rutgers. Then, a trip to Nebraska on Saturday and a jaunt up to Washington.
Such is the life of the modern-day college athlete, with U.C.L.A. moving into the Big Ten Conference, the erstwhile standard-bearer for Midwest football that now stretches from Piscataway to Puget Sound.
In all, the Bruins will travel 22,226 miles this season — nearly enough to circumnavigate the globe. It is the equivalent of 33 round trips to the Bay Area to play Stanford or U.C. Berkeley, U.C.L.A.’s former rivals that have moved to a newly bicoastal league of their own.
“The long flights are definitely a new thing,” said Carson Schwesinger, a junior linebacker at U.C.L.A. who is studying bioengineering. “But that’s the age of college football.”
In the ever bigger business of college athletics, conference consolidation has been an ongoing disruptive force. Brand-name programs have leaped at money from television networks, which have created their own football super leagues.
The end result may be more compelling programming, great for some athletic programs and fans, but it comes at a cost to the athletes in many sports who have been thrust into far-flung leagues that exist only to draw television revenue from football. Longer trips for games, extra missed classes and the effects of jet lag are heaping additional pressure on young adults trying to balance the roles of student, athlete and — in an age when they can cash in on their fame — entrepreneur.
‘Much More Time Than We’re Used To’
It’s not just football. The U.C.L.A. women’s basketball team opens its season in Paris, plays three games in Hawaii and makes three trips east of the Mississippi River, along with separate visits to San Francisco, Seattle and Eugene, Ore.
“When Stanford recruits an athlete, we tell them you can do anything — any major, any sport, anything socially,” said Hunter Hollenbeck, a senior on the diving team and the president of Stanford’s student-athlete advisory council. “But being an athlete now, it’s getting harder to preach that you can do anything. We’re coming to terms that athletics are taking much more time than we’re used to.”
Schools have scrambled over the last year to mitigate the effects of cross-country travel. Some have beefed up mental health and tutoring staffs, added more charter flights, more meals, encouraged online classes and counseled athletes on healthy sleep habits.
“The change in travel is incremental, not seismic,” said Martin Jarmond, the U.C.L.A. athletic director. “I think the student-athlete experience is better than it’s ever been.”
But Allison Brager, an Army neurobiologist who studies the effect of sleep deprivation on soldiers, said that repeated cross-country travel and disruption of the body’s circadian rhythms leads to higher injury rates, diminished academic performance and greater stress.
“We know this is a financial decision, but it’s coming at the physical and mental health cost of the athletes,” said Brager, who is on the N.C.A.A. mental health advisory board.
The travel burden is most extreme for athletes at West Coast schools, though it depends on the sport and academic calendar. Higher-profile sports like football and basketball are among those that will make repeated trips to the East Coast. Sports like water polo and men’s volleyball, which play in regional conferences, will not.
‘So Stretched That It’s Broken’
The Stanford football team played at Syracuse, returned home for the start of classes, then flew across the country to play in South Carolina, at Clemson. The U.S.C. women’s volleyball team, which has four midweek road games, is likely to miss at least 12 days of classes. The Washington football team will travel 16,624 miles for five games, farther than Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Texas and Vanderbilt will travel combined for their conference games.
Winter sports like basketball, and spring sports like baseball and softball, which both play more than 50 regular-season games, are likely to cause even more missed classes.
“It’s hard for me to imagine it’s not going to have an adverse impact given all the travel and the missing of classes, despite the best efforts to minimize travel,” said Mark Brilliant, a history professor at U.C.-Berkeley and a member of the school’s Faculty Athletic Council. “At a certain point, the student-athlete concept — or conceit — gets so stretched that it’s broken.”
In 2013, the Cal football team had a 44 percent graduation rate — the worst among 72 teams then in the so-called power conferences. After a series of reforms, the football team’s graduation rate has nearly doubled to 84 percent. Cal’s athlete graduation rate is 91 percent, a shade under the student population’s graduation rate at large.
Administrators make clear that they expect feedback from coaches and players and will make adjustments.
Washington has begun tracking how well athletes sleep. Cal is monitoring increases in missed instructional days and travel costs. Three U.C.L.A. athletics administrators determine who within the budget gets charter flights besides the moneymaking sports of football and men’s and women’s basketball.
Charter flights carrying a football team to the East Coast run at least $50,000, said Josh Hummel, an associate athletic director at Cal — and smaller planes that most teams use must stop to refuel on a cross-country flight.
But often the decisions are financial and underscore the hierarchy among sports.
This month, the U.C.L.A. men’s soccer team traveled on a commercial flight to Pittsburgh then rode a bus three hours for a game at Penn State in central Pennsylvania. The same weekend, the U.C.L.A. football team flew via charter into nearby State College, Pa.
But the airport runway there is not long enough to accommodate a large plane loaded with fuel taking off for the West Coast. James Franklin, the Penn State football coach, lobbied recently for a runway extension so his team wouldn’t have to bus 90 miles to Harrisburg to fly to the West Coast — as his team did for its game at U.S.C.
‘A Great Bonding Experience’
A handful of Division I teams have long had few alternatives. Hawaii must head to the mainland for competition. The University of San Diego’s football team played four games on the East Coast last season, and unlike major college football teams they fly commercially — sometimes with connections.
Eric Haney, a senior defensive back at San Diego, recalled a game two years ago when players were sprinting through a Chicago airport to catch their flight. “It looked like ‘Home Alone,’” Haney said, adding that last year most of the team applied for TSA PreCheck status.
He advised his peers to “embrace the struggle.”
“We fly Southwest a lot, so you have a 310-pound lineman in a middle seat with two women because we’re in boarding group C,” Haney said. “From the outside looking in, it might seem like a drag, but it’s a great bonding experience.”
At Washington, athletes are getting a crash course in jet lag mitigation. Drink cherry juice after dinner to sleep better. Open curtains when you wake up. Put your phone away well before bedtime. Lower your bedroom temperature to 65-68 degrees at night. Keep a consistent bed time. Don’t sleep on airplanes.
‘A Lot of Backlash’
Stanford athletes have prodded school administrators for priority class registration so they can more easily arrange academic schedules around athletic commitments, something that is standard for athletes at many schools. Hollenbeck, the Stanford diver, who is pursuing a master’s degree in electrical engineering, has made his case with the faculty senate, athletic director, provost and president. “There was a lot of backlash,” he said, adding that there was concern about athletes being treated different than regular students. His rebuttal: Athletes are different — they work 20 hours a week at their sport.
Few understood the potential burden of cross-country travel for college athletes better than Gene Block, who retired as U.C.L.A.’s chancellor in July and had signed off on the school’s move to the Big Ten two years ago.
Block’s field of research: the neurobiology of circadian rhythms.
Ravi Aysola, the director of the U.C.L.A. Sleep Disorders Center, said Block was especially concerned about athletes’ mental health and urged Aysola to guide administrators, coaches and athletes to better manage their body clocks.
“The reality is there’s not a boat load of data, but the data we do have on college students is that they don’t sleep enough,” he said. “These athletes are under a tremendous amount of pressure. Mental health is probably what’s most vulnerable when we talk about the impacts on the athlete with this type of travel.”
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