The Nightmare Travel Days Coming for USC and UCLA Athletes

Legaspi’s improvised exam setting is an example of the great lengths athletes in some college sports—ones that require more frequent travel than football but are not afforded the same cushy charter flights—go to juggle athletics and academics. It also will likely become a lot more common for all athletes at Southern California and UCLA once the schools join the Big Ten Conference in 2024.

The Los Angeles schools, located in the southwest corner of the Pac-12 conference, currently do not travel further than about 1,100 miles and one time zone to play league opponents. When UCLA and USC join the Big Ten, however, the closest school, Nebraska, is located more than 1,500 miles and two time zones away. That’s to say nothing of Rutgers and Maryland, whose campuses are three time zones ahead and about 2,700 miles east.

Even with the most creative scheduling models, which both UCLA and USC say they are exploring, there is no way around the reality that Trojans and Bruins athletes are about to be spending a lot more time on the road. It comes with major consequences for athletes—both in the classroom and on the field.

“It’s going to be a big change to be taking three to five hour flights for things that used to take one to two hour flights,” said a former Pac-12 golf coach. “This is going to be kind of gnarly for these players.”

Among the 42 varsity programs sponsored by USC and UCLA, golfers currently miss some of the most days of class because their schedule entails multiday regional tournaments primarily on weekdays, when courses aren’t in as high of demand by club members or the public. But their schedule does not stand to change as much as those of athletes competing in sports like baseball, basketball or volleyball, where the regular season usually includes a home and away game against every other member of the conference.

During the 2021 fall season, for example, the USC women’s volleyball team played 17 of their 30 games on weekdays, with eight of those requiring travel. They took a bus to UCLA’s campus and the Pac-12 universities in Arizona, but otherwise flew commercial, including a marathon trip between tournaments in Lexington, Ky., and Honolulu in September.

“We were gone for a solid week and a half, two weeks,” said Sabrina Smith, who played for the Trojans as a graduate student in 2021 after spending four years on UCLA’s team. “That trip was like a whirlwind,” she added, saying that the six-hour time change was “so confusing.”

Even though the majority of volleyball games last season took place on Fridays and Sundays, the team traveled two days before to help acclimate, said former USC player Raegan LeGrand. On the back end, the team’s connecting flights sometimes arrived back at Los Angeles International Airport as late as 2 a.m., making for a brutal turnaround before early morning lectures.

At both UCLA and USC, athletes get priority when picking classes and academic advisers help them build schedules around weekday practices and road games. Missing class here and there is unavoidable—part of the reason both universities have robust academic support resources available to athletes.

“We have the resources to take an individualized approach,” said Dr. Christina Rivera, UCLA’s Senior Woman Administrator who formerly oversaw the Bruins’ academic and student services department. She added, “The pandemic has shown us that we can be flexible, we can be nimble, we can be creative.”

Over the course of the entire season, Smith said that she missed eight days of class on Thursdays and Fridays during the fall semester; many of her classmates missed more.

There is little data on how much of an impact missing class can have on an athlete’s grades, as schedules are highly individualized and most universities do not disclose this information due to privacy concerns. However, an informal study of Virginia Tech athletes found a strong correlation between grades and attendance, said Tom Burbey, a professor of hydrogeosciences who serves on the university’s athletics committee.

For a standard course that meets three hours per week over a 15-week semester, said Burbey, “We came to the conclusion that if students had missed more than about nine [hours]their academic performance in that class greatly diminished by at least a half of a grade overall.”

Time spent on the road is part of the reason why Mariel Galdiano, a Bruins golfer who graduated in 2020, switched majors. She went to UCLA wanting to study psychology, but the university’s heavy emphasis on lab work for science majors, combined with her demanding schedule, prompted her to switch to sociology. Like many teammates who later turned professional, Galdiano said she often prioritized golf over academics. Still, she had to keep her grades up to stay eligible for NCAA competition.

“I took midterms and finals on the road after rounds at 10 p.m.,” said Galdiano, who now plays on the feeder tour to the LPGA circuit.

It isn’t just athletes’ grades that might take a hit: there is considerable evidence that long travel days spanning time zones have an adverse impact on physiological performance. In a survey conducted of Division I football and hockey players by Bowling Green State University sport management professor Amanda Paule-Koba, most college athletes reported struggling with jet lag and “bus legs” after long trips.

Numerous studies have shown that athletes ideally need one day per hour of time zone shift to reach peak performance, but college athletes rarely, if ever, get that much time given their academic commitments.

“From a performance, and just as a human standpoint, there really needs to be someone looking at this and saying, ‘Is this in the athletes’ best interest?’,” Paule-Koba said. “Especially if you have USC and UCLA flying across the country repeatedly.”

Once the move to the Big Ten is complete, sports like golf and cross-country that follow a regional scheduling format might provide a blueprint for other sports facing frequent far-flung head-to-head competitions. Neutral site tournaments or double headers might become more common, too.

Still, no amount of creativity can change the geographic reality that Los Angeles is more than 2,000 miles from the Big Ten headquarters in Chicago.

“I just hope a lot of these kids understand what they’re getting into,” said LeGrand of USC.

Write to Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com