Traveling with the Dukes

(The article was started Sunday and finished Tuesday)

With this season’s road-heavy schedule, it seems only fitting that I write about the ins and outs of a road trip with the JMU Men’s Basketball Team. I am writing this post while on the team bus en route to Charleston. After last night’s great win in Wilmington to start CAA play we are heading directly to Charleston before heading home as to save a little bit of travel especially since we aren’t missing any classes by doing so.

            The travel is an obvious perk of being a team manager. I love traveling and exploring and seeing new places (biking cross-country this summer is a great example of that). Little nooks and crannies of the US are so fascinating to me (i.e. Nacogdoches, TX). Additionally, the annual road trip to Northeastern provides a brief but worthwhile excursion home to see friends and family.

Most road trips and travel days are all similar. For every away contest we always go the day before the game and spend the night to be relaxed the day of the game and get acclimated in preparation for the game. (Yes, even for UVA we went the night before). The majority of the time we have a practice at Convo before getting on the road. After the brief practice we have about an hour in between the end of practice and the buses departure. While this is a time for the players and staff to relax, grab a bite to eat or shower this is the time for us managers to shine and get our stuff done.

One of the first things we do is get the drinks and snack bin. We have cases of Powerade and water locked up in a closet and we usually take a Powerade to water ratio of 2:1. After lugging the cases to the bus with my fellow manager(s) and/or graduate assistant(s) we must get all the gear from our equipment manager.

Each player is responsible for bringing his own practice gear but we as managers are responsible for bringing their game gear. The players have separate undershirts, socks, etc. for games and practices so we get a big bag from our equipment manager, Kevin, full of jerseys, shooting shirts and their game laundry loops (undershirts, socks, pads). The players never see their jersey or game gear until we arrive at the arena for the contest.

Another bag we get from Kevin is the gameday bag. The gameday bag holds all of our supplies. It has the whiteboards, markers, blank DVDs and extra gear for the guys in case they forget or lose something. It also has an empty bag in it, in case we need an extra bag for dirty laundry on the roadie.

Once we have all the bags we need, we put them on the bus along with the drinks. One case of water and one case of Powerade always go on the bus for consumption while the other cases are left under the bus. Once all is packed, it’s seat claiming time. Some people like the left side while others like the right (I’m a left-side kind of guy) and the battles for seats are usually around which seats have plugs. Sometimes every row has plugs but often only every third row has a plug. Those are the high-priced seats.

The loaded bus

Sometimes the rides go fast and other times they seem like they take forever. I usually pass the ride by doing homework or sleeping. Forgetting a pillow is a nightmare. It’s hard enough to sleep and get comfortable when you do have a pillow.

When the bus arrives at the hotel I B-line to the lobby for a luggage dolly. With all the team and personal bags we have to carry it’s never fun to carry every bag by hand.

My best friend--the luggage dolly

Most of the time the rest of the night is ours. I’m often found in the GAs room just sitting around sharing laughs and watching sports. And then I’ll get a text to head back to my room so a player can grab a Powerade.

Also the night before the game, we play our support staff game. This is something that I look forward to every road trip. We started doing it this year and it’s when we play the support staff of the opposing school the night before the game in a friendly pickup game. Support staff refers to managers, GAs, trainers, Director of Operations, etc.—anybody who wants to play. Our players enjoy coming to watch (laugh and make fun of us). The games are a great way to play some pickup and meet the staffs of the other teams.

Not typically, except this Wilmington/Charleston trip because we aren't going home, we do laundry on the road. I coordinate ahead of time with the other teams manager(s) and/or Director of Operations to use their laundry facilities. This trip, Charleston has been great to work with in allowing us to use their facilities. I am very grateful of their generosity. 

Doing laundry in Charleston

On gameday we wake up around 9:30 and have breakfast catered at the hotel. Hotel meals are always hit or miss—sometimes they’re very good and other times they were clearly just heated up in the microwave. This year, though, our Director of Operations, Rob Summers, has really come through with some quality meals.

A few hours after breakfast we head to the arena for shootaround. This is our chance to get acclimated to the gym. It is a very light, hour-long practice. It usually involves a simple shooting drill or two and then a run-through of our own sets as well as how to defend the opponent’s sets. Every once in a while I get placed on the scout team (running the opponent’s plays) and get to release my inner Jerrelle Benimon or Marcus Thornton. You ask me, I get buckets. You ask the players, I get locked up. You can decide who you want to believe.

Post-shootaround is the time to chill and get in game mode. Save for pregame meal four hours before tip it’s a relaxing time. This is usually a prime time to squeeze in a quick snooze. And then two hours before gametime we leave for the gym. We typically go home right after the game so we must be all packed up by this point. I have to be sure I’m ready to go before the bus is ready to leave so that I have time to get all the bags onto the bus.

Mixed in with all the free time we have is usually a workout in the hotel gym with Dimitrije Cabarkapa. We like to put in a hard workout together.

My pregame routine includes passing out the jerseys, setting up the bench and making sure everything is running smoothly until it’s time to rock & roll.

After we get the win, it is my duty to make sure everything is put back the way it was before. I collect all the players dirty clothes in the laundry bags and clean up the bench and locker room. Especially on road trips, I take pride in making sure the locker room and bench are cleaner or as clean as when we showed up. People take note of that and associate it with JMU. I’m usually the last one on the bus after I cleaned everything up and then its all zzzz’s until we get to Harrisonburg early the next morning and have to get up and go to class.

Uniform Fiasco

My first post on this blog that I am excited to create. Many of the posts will be about how some of the operations work or neat stories. The first post goes way back to the CAA Championship Game this March. To set the stage..the CAA championship game was our 3rd game in three days. We have three uniforms too--a road purple, a home white and a home gold. We wore the white for the first game against William & Mary and wore the purple for our second game against Delaware. That means that we were left with the gold jersey. Being the road team for the championship game, we figured we could wear the gold jersey (since it's not white) and we wouldn't have to do laundry for the purple jerseys. This is where the problem began. We arrived at the Richmond Coliseum and handed out the gold jerseys to the team. They went out and warmed up for a good bit and then the refs came on to the court (they usually come to the court around the 30-minute mark pregame). The refs saw our gold jerseys and were quick to say that they were too close to white (which Northeastern was wearing) and that we would have to change. It is no surprise that the refs declared the gold jerseys too similar to white. It wouldn't be that big a deal that they needed to switch to the purple jerseys except for the fact that the jerseys were all in a bag in the hotel and were just crammed in the bag after the Delaware game all sweaty. You can see here how light the gold jerseys are:

Realizing we had to act quickly, myself, my fellow manager (Mike), our GAs (Kevin and Sam), and redshirt player (Dimitrije) sprinted back to the hotel through downtown Richmond in our suits in relatively warm weather. We told the bus driver so that she could meet us at the hotel and drive us back. We got to the hotel and swiftly ran to my room to get the jersey bag. The bus driver made it to the hotel and in the process of heading back to the Coliseum, we sorted the sweaty jerseys to match them with the shorts. It smelled pretty rank. We made it to the Coliseum with 15 minutes to spare and handed out the jerseys to the players and the rest is history. With the dirty jerseys JMU won its first CAA Championship in 19 years. Maybe it was the dirty jerseys, who knows. Maybe if we didn't wash them after the championship game and wore them dirty against Indiana in the second round of the tournament we would have won that game too. A true superstitious person will always wonder. Another funny aspect is that the players didn't know they were wearing dirty jerseys until after the game. Luckily it didn't make anybody sick!