By Vytas Mazeika
Daily Bruin Senior [email protected]
Friday’s UCLA-Arizona softball game, which could determine
the Pac-10 champion and top seed in the NCAA Regionals, begins at 2
p.m.
Arizona will try not to worry about the fact that it has
reservations for a 6:20 p.m. flight to Seattle.
But if the game goes into extra innings, there’s a
possibility the flight might get a bit uncomfortable.
“If the game is 2 1/2 hours long, we don’t even get
a chance to shower,” Arizona head coach Mike Candrea said.
“It definitely is different than any of the trips.”
When a team usually travels in the Pac-10, the trip is
associated with two schools.
Go to the Bay Area, and you play against Stanford and Cal. Head
to Oregon, and you’ll face Oregon and Oregon State. Same
thing with Arizona.
But in softball, schools don’t make four trips. They make
three. That’s because there are no USC or Washington State
softball teams.
This leaves UCLA and Washington as an awkward pairing.
“There’s no easy trip in the Pac-10 because of the
quality of the teams, but this clearly adds in an extra flight in
the middle of the trip,” Oregon State head coach Kirk Walker
said when his team visited Westwood three weeks ago.
“It’s not ideal, but it’s also not impossible
to be successful. Obviously the bigger obstacle is the quality of
the two teams, in my opinion, more than the travel in
between.”
Oregon State lost 7-0 to UCLA that weekend before flying 1,100
miles to Seattle, where they promptly lost 3-1 and 1-0 to
Washington.
The distance traveled between UCLA and Washington is more than
five times longer than that of the other three trips combined.
Palo Alto (Stanford) to Berkeley (Cal) is roughly 40 miles. Same
with Eugene (Oregon) to Corvallis (OSU). The Tucson (Arizona) and
Tempe (ASU) trip is a bit longer, by 60 miles.
Tougher still for Arizona is the fact that the Pac-10
doesn’t schedule Sunday games for the last weekend of regular
season play. So instead of having only one game in Seattle
Saturday, Arizona is in store for a doubleheader after the long
trip Friday night.
“That’s the only downfall of the schedule,”
Candrea said. “You come down to the last weekend, which is
the most important weekend of the year for you, and you’re
playing a format that is different than it’s been all
year.”
Though it’s not ideal to group UCLA and Washington
together, measures could be taken to ease the inconvenience, such
as a day off between travel.
But for now head coaches like Candrea and Walker will need to
buckle up and bear the displeasure.
“But it’s better than it was when we used to play
doubleheader, travel, doubleheader,” Walker said.