The Pac-12’s collapse began with an ambush.
While the Big Ten Conference was trying to close a television contract already estimated at $1 billion a year, the conference was secretly negotiating with USC and UCLA in an effort to increase its influence and extract more money from potential broadcast partners.
In June 2022, USC and UCLA surprised the Pac-12 Conference by seeking the influx of funds and long-term stability that the Big Ten offered. Six more schools dropped out the following summer after the weakened Pac-12 Conference was unable to secure media rights deals comparable to those recently negotiated by other powerhouse conferences. By September 2023, Stanford and University of California had also dropped out, voluntarily accepting significantly reduced revenue sharing in exchange for a lifeline from the Atlantic Coast Conference.
The sudden dissolution of the century-old Pac-12 is a reminder that the welfare of student-athletes is rarely the top priority in college sports’ major conferences. The pursuit of television rights fees almost always comes first, even if it means eliminating cherished regional rivalries, ushering in an era of bicoastal conferences and imposing unnecessary travel burdens on already overworked athletes.
Television networks and streaming platforms may value a university based on its brand and the number of viewers who tune in to its football games, but the demise of the Pac-12 won’t just impact the most revenue-generating sports. Frankly, the conference realignment has redefined the term “travel ball,” doubling and in some cases tripling conference travel for lesser-known sports, especially women’s volleyball, whose players will spend the most time on planes, miss the most class, and suffer the most from fatigue and jet lag.
No former Pac-12 school is more of a geographic misfit for the new league than the ACC’s Stanford and UC. Fifteen of the ACC’s other 16 schools are in the Eastern time zone. Of those, Notre Dame and Louisville are the closest, at least 2,200 miles from Stanford and UC.
In its first year as a member of the ACC, the Stanford women’s volleyball team is on track to travel more than 33,700 miles by the end of the 2024-25 season, the longest of any fall sports program in collegiate sports. The more than 25,000 miles the Stanford women’s volleyball team will fly during ACC competition is longer than the circumference of the Earth. That’s nearly three times the distance Stanford traveled during conference play in the Pac-12’s final season last year.
“My status with United is already Premier 1K,” Stanford women’s volleyball coach Kevin Hambly told Yahoo Sports with a laugh. “I don’t know what the level above that is, but I think I have a good chance.”
The morning after Stanford earned its invitation to join the ACC last September, Hambly held a brainstorming session with his staff. He devoted an entire whiteboard in his office to writing down potential concerns and changes that should be considered.
At first, the challenge of preparing for 14 games in the Eastern or Central time zone seemed daunting for the two-time national champion coach. Hambly wondered if Stanford would have to fly out a day early to get acclimated to Eastern time or if they would stay on Eastern time while in Palo Alto, and how he would ensure his players got enough sleep and still had time to do their schoolwork.
After nine months of meetings with medical professionals, academic coordinators, sleep consultants and other campus experts, Hambly came to the same conclusion as many other former Pac-12 women’s volleyball coaches.
“Everyone was panicking at first,” Hambly said, “but the more we looked into it, the more it seemed like it wasn’t as big a deal as we thought it would be.”
Introduce charter flights
University of Washington women’s volleyball coach Leslie Gabriel remembers exactly when she knew her team wouldn’t be at a disadvantage traveling more than 22,000 miles to Big Ten games this season. It was when the university agreed to use occasional charter flights when necessary. Only once in Gabriel’s 23 years as a member of her alma mater’s coaching staff has the Huskies had that luxury.
“I don’t know what the administration will say, but they’ve been great through the transition and let us know they understand the toll that traveling is going to have on our team,” Gabriel told Yahoo Sports. “They want to help in any way they can.”
Washington is scheduled to fly four charter flights this season, mostly to and from Big Ten schools such as Penn State and Wisconsin that are far from major airports with plenty of direct service to Seattle. That will cut down on travel time and missed classes for the Huskies, plus allow them to sleep in their own beds on Sunday nights at the end of weekend road trips.
USC and UCLA, also new to the Big Ten, will also fly charter planes for at least four women’s volleyball trips this season, something the Los Angeles schools rarely did as members of the Pac-12, and Hambly said the Stanford women’s volleyball team will continue to fly charter planes select times in the ACC, just as it did previously in the Pac-12.
“There’s no straight line to get to Notre Dame or back home from Louisville, so you end up taking a charter flight,” Hambly said. “But taking a charter flight to Miami takes longer than hopping on a big jet and flying straight there. So it’s like, ‘Let’s look at our options and see what makes sense.'”
“No red eyes.”
To ease travel for women’s volleyball and other Olympic sports that have multiple games per week, the Big Ten and ACC have adjusted their scheduling: Teams flying across the country back home might play their second game of the trip on a Saturday night or Sunday morning to get a decent night’s sleep on Sunday.
Coaches appreciate these player-friendly adjustments because their biggest concern isn’t the travel time, but the journey across time zones, which studies by sleep experts suggest can hurt players’ performance, especially when traveling east because it’s harder to advance the body clock than it is to delay it.
Coaches from former Pac-12 women’s volleyball programs have a variety of strategies in place to minimize the issue.
Washington typically leaves on a Thursday for a two-game Pac-12 trip on Friday and Sunday, but Gabriel is experimenting with leaving a day earlier for Big Ten trips. He said the Huskies will “arrive late Wednesday night for the Friday game and get a little bit accustomed to the local time zone.”
Washington’s players will continue to practice in the morning this season and have classes that start after 11 a.m. PST. If the Huskies get home from a long road trip late Sunday night, Gabriel can cancel Monday morning practice and let the team sleep in late to make sure no one misses class.
Last year, when Stanford’s coaching staff began exploring flight options to ACC cities, women’s volleyball director of operations Shauna Smith made the mistake of casually mentioning the overnight flights to Hambly. Hambly responded enthusiastically, providing link after link to study and article showing that overnight flights negatively impact the team’s athletic performance.
“I feel bad,” Hambly says. “She was like, ‘I get it, Kevin! I should have told you no nocturnal.'”
Stanford tries to get its players acclimated to Eastern time as quickly as possible by flying to an ACC city as early as possible on Thursday morning. In theory, if players wake up at 5 a.m. PST to catch a 7 or 8 a.m. flight and don’t take more than a short nap on the plane, they should be able to fall asleep by 10 or 11 p.m. PST that night.
“Based on everything the medical staff is saying, we should be able to play on schedule,” Hambly said.
Time Zone Adjustment
With the Big Ten and ACC and former Pac-12 women’s volleyball teams each traveling at least 21,000 miles for league play this season, coaching staffs have been very careful about scheduling non-conference games.
USC will only travel once from Los Angeles, likely to avoid road fatigue for the players. UCLA, by contrast, has nonconference trips scheduled to Atlanta, Knoxville (Tenn.), Fort Worth (Texas) and Northern California — more than 12,000 miles of travel before Big Ten Conference play begins. The Bruins don’t play until their home opener against Ohio State on Sept. 29.
UCLA coach Alfie Left explained to Yahoo Sports that his team has a “pretty veteran group” that makes them feel comfortable taking on the challenge. Left sees the non-conference season as an ideal time to “really iron out the issues that come with travel and traversing time zones.”
“What time are we going to practice? When are we going to film? What time are we going to go to bed so we can feel our best to perform the next day? The more information we can get as early as we can about what the travel is like, the better our chances of making the right decisions going into Big Ten games, for sure.”
Two weeks ago, during UCLA’s first nonleague trip of the season to Georgia Tech, Lefty asked the captains for feedback, and they warned about team activities and film sessions that went on until 8 p.m. ET that were making it difficult for players to relax, follow bedtime routines and get to sleep at an appropriate time the night before a game.
Because UCLA plays on a quarter-time system and classes don’t start until September 22, Coach Left considered having his team stay East between early-season trips to Atlanta and Knoxville. He ultimately nixed the idea, but encouraged his players to wake up around 6 a.m. Pacific time and go to bed early during their three-day stay in Los Angeles.
“We don’t give detailed instructions,” Left says, “but we do make suggestions, but if we call at 7:30 or 8 and the person isn’t awake yet, we’re like, ‘You might want to get up now.'”
Only one women’s volleyball team has long weathered the 2,500-mile flight across time zones on a regular basis: The University of Hawaii, which plays all of its Big West Conference road trip games on the mainland, where such trips have been a long-standing reality.
Hawaii assistant coach Kaleo Baxter told Yahoo Sports that several fellow coaches asked him during the offseason how the Rainbow Wahine approach their road trips and why they’ve been so successful on the road. Baxter said Hawaii doesn’t have the funds to charter, so the coaching staff focuses on establishing a routine and making the players as comfortable as possible.
Hawaii practices on Wednesday morning, leaves campus at noon and flies out of Honolulu in the afternoon before a Friday-Saturday conference trip. During the conference trip, Hawaii players are required to be in bed by 11 p.m. PST and wake up at 8 a.m. to participate in a team walk and have breakfast. The rest of the itinerary is set up in a way that makes it difficult for players to find time for a 30-minute or more nap during the rest of the day.
“It’s going to be quite an adjustment for a team that’s not used to traveling this much the first year or two,” Baxter said. “It’s a drastic change, but I’m sure the coaching staff all do a great job and will get the team ready for the big games.”
For months, Hambly discussed ACC travel in weekly meetings and wrote ideas on a whiteboard in his office about how to smooth the transition. Finally, in August, Hambly erased the board. He was confident Stanford had a good preseason plan in place.
“People think I’m crazy,” Hambly said. “They say, ‘Why aren’t you worried?’ But it’s problem-solving and it’s not as big a problem as we initially thought.”
Washington coach Gabriel is also cautiously optimistic.
“This will be a good learning year,” she said. “After that we’ll know how much this affects us and what we need to change. My gut feeling is, and this may be an exaggeration, but I think we won’t know until a year has passed how much it’s going to cost us.”
