It would have been easier if Georgia Tech were going to Boston to play Boston College in the season opener and not Ireland. For one thing, Tech’s support staff wouldn’t need to enlist a hotel chef to teach the kitchen at the Yellow Jackets’ team hotel how to cook bacon.
The equipment-room guys wouldn’t have to count up how many extra chin straps will be accompanying the team. And the institute most likely wouldn’t have to plan and take part in academic and business forums expected to include Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Gov. Nathan Deal.
But the Yellow Jackets, who begin preseason training Thursday, will indeed play their season opener in Dublin on Sept. 3, their first game ever off American soil and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for players, coaches and traveling fans. For the athletic department and school administrators, it has meant dozens of hours spent planning and preparing, communicating with counterparts in Dublin and Boston, making site visits and figuring out what a zip-and-link bed is, and who can fit in one.
“It just takes a lot of follow-up and going through, but I think it’ll be great,” said Mike Huff, Tech’s football operations director. “It’ll be a good deal at the end of the day.”
Passports, apps, beds
For Huff, one of the biggest anticipated challenges — securing passports for almost the entire roster — was not actually that big a problem. With a recommendation from logistics colleagues with the Falcons who helped plan their team’s travel to London in 2014, he hired a company that handles passport applications. Huff sent an email to players’ parents last November, asking them to return their sons to campus in January with the documentation necessary for their passports. They took care of it in the spring and again in July for incoming freshmen.
Other challenges have steadily surfaced, such as last summer when he made a site visit to Dublin’s Aviva Stadium and a tour host pointed out an area three or four rows above the field and told Huff that was where the coaches’ boxes would be.
Alarmed, Huff was able to secure a spot for the coaches in TV booths at a higher level.
Huff has been waist deep in other planning minutiae. He found a smart-phone app that will allow players to communicate inexpensively with family and friends back home. He worked with assistant operations director Craig Candeto to decipher the different room types at the team hotel — a zip-and-link bed is one that can be connected to another bed to create one larger bed — and assign the different bed sizes to different position groups. (Family beds for the linemen, separated zip-and-links for the A-backs.)
The team’s cultural excursions will be a tour of Dublin and a team dinner at a restaurant in a fishing village near Dublin. Players will be given converters to charge their electrical devices. Perhaps most important, Candeto did a taste test of the team meals and found the fried chicken and bacon to differ from the American versions.
“To them, bacon is ham,” Huff said.
Huff has sought the help of a favored chef at the hotel where the Jackets stay when they play at North Carolina to help tweak the recipes of the team’s hotel in Ireland. Huff noted how eager his contacts in Ireland have been to meet the team’s needs and understands the challenges they face. He compared it to the crash course Tech would need to undergo if the Irish national soccer team were to come to Bobby Dodd Stadium for a match.
“If you’ve played soccer, you’re probably going to have a good idea, but you’re not going to know exactly everything, so you’ve got to take that mindset and put it in there,” he said.
How many towels?
For a typical road game, Tech loads up an 18-wheeler with equipment and drives to the game site. For the opener, the team will fly with necessities, such as uniforms, helmets, pads and cleats. With cargo space limited, the rest will be shipped several days in advance. Equipment manager Tom Conner estimated that almost 90 percent of the equipment will be shipped early, including headsets, rain gear, spare cleats, helmets, medical supplies and more.
That is what has caused the equipment, training and video staff considerably more work. To clear customs, all of the roughly 35 trunks that the team will send will require a carnet — a document listing the contents in each trunk, specifying not only the items, but the number of each, their cost and place of origin. That’s everything from shoulder pads to shoelaces.
The equipment room staff has been doing this inventory while simultaneously getting ready for the season ahead.
“It’s been about a month’s worth of work, more on (equipment assistant Punt Windham) than me,” Conner said, “just doing the carnet because that’s not something that we would normally have to do.”
They’ve also been trying to sort out various matters that wouldn’t merit a thought on a typical road trip. Deciding on how many towels to bring, since the home team typically supplies towels, but Boston College is the designated home team. Planning for locker-room spaces at Aviva Stadium that are designed for soccer teams, not college football teams with 100-plus players.
Anticipating a time crunch on Thursday, the day of arrival, as the team plans to practice a few hours after arrival but knowing that it could take 2-3 hours for gear to clear customs. Hoping that all the equipment that will be shipped separately will make it to Dublin on time, and back to Atlanta.
“A lot of unknowns,” Conner said.
Beyond football, game promoters and the two schools (along with Dublin’s Trinity College) will hold an academic forum on Thursday and a business luncheon Friday featuring former Sen. George Mitchell as the keynote speaker. With the expected attendance of Reed and Deal, Atlanta business leaders will also lead a trade mission to the Irish capital. Three metro Atlanta high-school teams, Westminster, Blessed Trinity and Marist, will play games against other American prep teams on Friday.
Tech deputy athletic director Brett Daniel described it as a process with “a lot of moving parts outside of the athletic department.”
The team will leave Aug. 31, a Wednesday, after practice and arrive the following morning. If all goes as planned, the passing routes will be as crisp as the bacon.
Said Huff, “That’s why we have ops people, I guess.”
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