Darryl Watkins has woken up aboard the Syracuse men’s basketball team’s charter plane several times to one of his teammates screaming about a leg cramp.

The sight usually draws a chuckle from Watkins. He’s suffered his share of excruciating cramps sitting in small, 50-seat planes on some of the team’s longer trips home from road games.

‘I’m a little too big for the seat,’ the 6-foot-11 Watkins said.

Watkins can blame the expansion of the Big East for some of those aches and pains. By 2005, the conference had lost Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College to the Atlantic Coast Conference. In turn, the Big East replaced them with five Conference USA teams – Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville, Marquette and South Florida – beginning in the fall of 2005.

Some Syracuse athletics teams suffer from the effects of the expansion more than others. SU’s softball, volleyball and men’s and women’s soccer teams have added conference games to their schedules, forcing administrators and coaches to conjure up creative ways to balance their budgets.

Players now have to prepare for longer road trips to locales as far west as Milwaukee and Chicago. Instead of hopping on buses to nearby schools, many endure hours of sitting in airport terminals waiting for connecting flights. Others have missed more classes than before and find themselves exhausted for days after road trips.

Watkins is lucky enough. The men’s and women’s basketball teams travel by charter planes and have to suffer only from longer flight times. Other Orange athletes have grown much more familiar with airport lines and commercial flights than they’d prefer.

‘I think the general consensus by the time our last flight came in,’ said softball assistant coach Jaime Grillo, ‘was that our team was pretty over getting on a plane and getting into an airport.’

In the spring of 2006, the softball team added doubleheaders against DePaul, Louisville and USF to its schedule while dropping only BC from the year before. Its calendar bulged from nine Big East contests to 11, with a road schedule of up to seven doubleheaders some years.

The men’s and women’s soccer teams saw their conference schedules bumped from 10 to 11 games, with an additional road game once every two years.

Before the realignment, teams usually took a bus for road games, with the exception of visits to Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. But the five new Big East schools are too far away for driving trips.

‘When you add a flight into the mix, it’s another matter,’ Grillo said. ‘It’s just a lot easier to get onto a bus.’

Rob Edson, SU’s senior associate director of athletics, said travel costs for athletics teams have increased about 4 to 5 percent since the beginning of the 2005-06 season, partly because of the realignment. But Edson said the athletics department has managed to rein in budgetary increases with several cost-cutting measures.

For example, SU men’s soccer head coach Dean Foti said he might respond to a road-heavy Big East schedule in a particular year with fewer non-conference games in far-away locations. In 2005, his team flew to Louisville and DePaul during conference play, but it played only one non-conference game on the road against Hartwick in nearby Oneonta, N.Y.

The expansion may have hit softball the hardest, because the Northeast winter leaves the team with no choice but to travel to warmer climates for its preseason games. Syracuse softball has always flown to four tournaments before conference play began, and that isn’t likely to ever change.

But the softball team responded this year by securing a full sponsorship from Schutt Sports for all its equipment needs. Previously, the team received free apparel from TPS, but Schutt now also supplies the players with bats, gloves, helmets, balls and bases, providing a considerable relief for head coach Leigh Ross’ finances.

‘Yeah, our costs have gone up,’ Edson said. ‘The league itself has created some challenges for travel. But I don’t think they’re as significant as they might appear to be because of what we’ve been able to do, offsetting some of the non-conference costs.’

While administrators have navigated the challenges posed by the expansion, the players and coaches who actually go on the road trips haven’t fared as well.

Grillo said a typical bus trip to a nearby Big East school normally takes the softball team five hours. Flying to destinations like Louisville and Tampa, on the other hand, takes up to eight or nine hours when they factor in getting to the airport early, layovers, delays and waits at the luggage carousel.

And then there was the one weekend last year when the softball team had to play at Louisville and South Florida on back-to-back days. By the time the players got off their sixth plane in three days on Sunday night at Syracuse Hancock International Airport, they could barely walk straight.

‘We were like zombies,’ Grillo said, ‘getting them back to Manley (Field House) and getting them back into our cars and going home.’

The women’s soccer team has an equally grueling trip on its calendar this fall, when the Orange plays at South Florida on a Friday night and then at Marquette on the following Sunday afternoon. Already, head coach Pat Farmer isn’t looking forward to the 5:30 a.m. flight his team will have to take from Tampa to Milwaukee that Saturday.

By October of last season, Farmer noticed many of his younger players looking lethargic during weekday practices. The NCAA mandates Monday as an off day after weekend games, but Farmer gave his team some Tuesdays off as well.

‘It just isn’t a calendar they’re used to,’ Farmer said. ‘The cumulative effect is significant.

‘You see it in the normal, routine stuff where they’re not so peppy. They’re maybe not so excited about that sometimes.’

The men’s and women’s basketball teams are fortunate enough to travel by charter plane to their away games. The athletics department considers charter flights absolutely necessary for the two squads because of their intensive conference schedules.

In the span of two months, each basketball team plays 16 Big East games – eight on the road and many on weekdays. Last season, the men’s team faced South Florida on a Wednesday night, sandwiched between two weekend home games. The women’s squad ended its season with a home date against Louisville on a Saturday before flying out for a Monday night clash against Cincinnati.

Watkins acknowledged countless hours on the plane added up over the course of the season for the men’s team, especially with the farther destinations stretching the length of their flights.

‘It’s really hectic – you’re getting off the plane, playing and then getting back on the plane to go somewhere else,’ Watkins said. ‘It kind of gets on you, but you’ve got to play through it.’

In addition, having to fly out of Syracuse for weekend games has caused athletes to miss more class time and exams. Instead of leaving the evening before a game, teams usually now catch early afternoon flights, especially with the limited slate of flights offered at Hancock Airport.

On several occasions this season, the softball schedule has forced the players to miss all their Thursday and Friday classes, with delays on return flights wiping out some Mondays as well.

Getting to Monday classes hasn’t been easy, even if their flights have gotten them home in time Sundays. Junior softball player Chanel Roehner said she never feels like getting up on Mondays after road trips, and it takes her the next few days to shake that sluggish feeling from her body.

‘I think a lot of the younger girls, they’ve really been struggling with trying to make up the work,’ senior third baseman Erin Gray said. ‘Most professors are really understanding about it, but you have your few who just don’t want to hear it, and you just kind of figure your way out and wing it.’

If there’s one consolation about the longer trips, it’s allowed the athletes to spend more time with one another. Grillo said the softball players often start singing aloud with one another in airport terminals because ‘at that point, they’re almost delirious because they’re so tired.’

But for many athletes, that camaraderie provides scant consolation for the hours they have to spend in airports and the feeling of lethargy that settles in their bones by the end of the season.

‘By the time we get back (from each trip), we’re dead – hooray softball,’ Gray said, laughing. ‘I like traveling. I just don’t like packing and then leaving and coming back and packing, leaving and then coming back. It’s fun, but after a while, it just kind of wears on you.’

Published on April 26, 2007 at 12:00 pm