Nov. 14—ST. GEORGE, Utah — Fewer than a dozen people remained in line at Signature Flight Support’s security station on Friday when word came to Marcus McCurty that Eastern Washington’s chartered plane — and the rest of them at the Spokane International Airport — wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
At that point, McCurty, Eastern Washington’s director of football operations, started making phone calls.
Advertisement
He didn’t stop until about 10 p.m.
“I was weirdly calm,” McCurty said Saturday, after the Eagles traveling football party had all arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn in St. George, Utah, about 20 hours later than originally planned.
McCurty had watched Jake Rasmussen, his good friend who previously held the DFO title at Eastern, navigate travel headaches before, like the ones the Eagles experienced before playing at the University of Florida in 2022.
“Ras was so calm those days,” McCurty said. “I remember thinking, ‘surely it’s going to come to me eventually.’ “
Advertisement
McCurty wasn’t the only person figuring out what to do Friday, when the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide for nearly five hours. Football games — including five in the Big Sky Conference — were among the many sporting events affected.
Thanks to the mutual decision between the two athletic departments to change the kickoff time to 6 p.m. Pacific, the Eagles and the Utah Tech Trailblazers are on track to play Saturday night at Greater Zion Stadium. It will be the first time they have ever played football against each other.
But for McCurty and other members of the Eagles contingent that eventually made it to St. George, it’s been a whirlwind of a day.
A ‘5-minute’ or ‘5-hour’ issue
Advertisement
The traveling football party was only a few minutes from taxiing for takeoff when the news came that they wouldn’t be able to do so. They sat on the plane for about 90 minutes waiting for clearance.
When that time came and went, the Eagles decided to get back in their cars and on the buses and head back to Cheney.
McCurty’s first call was to the Hilton Garden Inn in St. George, where the Eagles would no longer be needing hotel rooms for the night or the 100 Chipotle burritos players would have eaten upon arrival.
The burritos couldn’t be canceled, but Chipotle donated them to a local shelter, McCurty said.
Advertisement
At the Big Sky Conference offices in Farmington, Utah, deputy commissioner Dan Satter was monitoring travel for the five schools headed elsewhere as well as the officiating crews scheduled to each football game.
“We just started hearing from our schools that at least one was on the runway and a couple were heading to the airport and this had happened,” Satter said. “At first it was like, is this a five-minute or a five-hour issue? As it went on, it became a game of communication, and our schools did a good job of keeping us in the loop.”
Satter said the league deferred to athletic directors to sort out logistics, specifically kickoff times. Originally, the league was looking at a schedule with four early afternoon kickoffs and one primetime night game in Missoula between Idaho State and Montana. That was the only game in which the road team was planning to travel by bus.
The others all involved teams flying. And none of them had gotten in the air before the restriction went into effect.
Advertisement
Eventually, Montana State, UC Davis and Weber State flew out Friday night, with the ground order causing much less disruption for them than it ultimately did for Eastern.
When the Eagles got back to campus around 4 p.m. on Friday, they held meetings in the football facilities. The Eagles radio team of Larry Weir and Paul Sorensen decided to walk over to Reese Court and call the men’s basketball game between the Eagles and Corban University, ready to pull the cord and head to the airport at a moment’s notice.
But around 5:30 p.m., coaches sent players home with a tentative plan to leave for St. George in the morning. A half hour later, the FAA lifted its restriction and planes started flying again.
McCurty said the team considered trying to fly out still that evening, but it ran into one primary logistical issue. Rules dictated that the pilots scheduled to take them had to be up in the air by 8 p.m. They would have been cutting that close.
Advertisement
The team decided to stick to its Saturday morning plan. Already the Eagles and Trailblazers had agreed to the later kickoff time.
So, at 7 p.m. McCurty handled another item: breakfast. He called Gerardo’s in Cheney, who agreed to make 130 breakfast burritos in time for the team’s Saturday morning flight.
With breakfast arranged, the next challenge was figuring out how the team was going to get back to the airport in the morning. The bus drivers who had taken them on Friday were already scheduled to take the LSU men’s basketball team to Numerica Veterans Arena in Spokane for Saturday’s game against Gonzaga.
So, instead, the team bought individual bus tickets and STA added buses to its regular routes to get the players who didn’t ride with their position coaches from Cheney to the airport.
Advertisement
At 9:30, the traveling party took off from Spokane, and about 90 minutes later it was on the ground in St. George.
The party that arrived was smaller than originally expected: The wives of six coaches were scheduled to come along, but because of the changes — notably, the 1 a.m. scheduled arrival in Spokane early Sunday morning — only two made the trip.
This isn’t the first time Eastern has dealt with travel issues. There was the Florida trip in 2022, which included the Eagles’ game being moved to Sunday because of a hurricane and considerable delays returning to Spokane. They didn’t get back until 6 a.m. the next day.
There was also the trip to Southeastern Louisiana in 2024, when the team landed in New Orleans on a Friday, drove east to Biloxi, Mississippi, to avoid the impacts of another hurricane, and then drove back to Hammond, Louisiana, on game day to play a night game before flying back out of New Orleans afterward.
Advertisement
Many Eagles players were ill on that trip to Louisiana, too — so many that they were laying down nearly the full length of the airplane’s aisle.
There have been other issues: a shortage of hotel rooms in Reno, Nevada, a week after that game in Louisiana. And there was a bus that broke down 10 years ago on the way back from Montana State.
McCurty said he knew to expect challenges when he became the director of football operations. His job is to work through them.
As for how much the program owes the Hilton Garden Inn for meeting rooms and hallway space before Saturday’s game against Utah Tech?
“That’ll be a Monday issue,” McCurty said. “We’ve got to figure that out later.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
