Traveling is an often forgotten aspect of college athletics. This fall the Badgers’ volleyball team will do a fair amount of traveling. They will play tournaments in Texas and Georgia and travel to every school in their conference for the Big Ten portion of their schedule.

The Badgers double up their weekend to get all their games in. One weekend they will play at Michigan and Michigan State, then another at Purdue and Indiana. UW will have a weekend where they travel to Minnesota and then Iowa. In a fairly short venture they will play at Northwestern and Illinois, and finish their road play with a weekend trip to Ohio State and Penn State.

These weekend pairings are done for convenience sake. In total, the volleyball players will travel close to 8,000 miles this fall to play all their road games.

“A long bus ride can be good in a lot of ways, catching up on homework, team bonding, and visualization for the match,” Sheila Shaw, freshman volleyball player said. “Sometimes we even use the time to watch tape on the opposing team to gain information on their tendencies.”

The team does not always travel by bus though — they often take a private jet — but the time commitment is still a substantial amount. Being an athlete at a top university would lead one to believe that schoolwork would suffer with such an active game schedule, but the players have time to do homework during travel, and players sign up for classes with their game schedule in mind.

“Missing classes for road games is almost unlikely because we try to schedule our classes around our playing schedule in the fall, if at all possible,” Shaw commented. “Sometimes it does get to be a long weekend but it’s all worth it in the end. Especially when you come out with the win”

Ryan Ridge, a senior on the UW men’s track team, feels that having to travel helps him in the long run with his studies.

“[Travel] definitely makes school a lot harder,” Ridge noted. “But it also helps in the sense that you manage your time or keep from putting things off.”

Because the men’s track team only has one home meet this year, they have done a large amount of traveling. Overall the amount of travel has been challenging for the senior.

“With a full load of classes, it’s definitely taken a toll on me with academics, ” Ridge added. “But you just have to know when to manage your time well in terms of studying on the road and in the hotel, or on the bus.”

Beyond the homework aspect of having to travel, there are other situations that need to be dealt with.

“Traveling affects your track performance in the sense that you’re sleeping in a different bed all the time, or you have to get fast food,” Ridge said. “But in a way it’s nice to go on the road and go to a meet where all the best runners are.”

Travel is necessary though for some sports like track in Wisconsin’s climate.

“We’d love to have more [home meets],” UW men’s track head coach Ed Nuttycombe said. “It’s just that we don’t quite have the facility nor sometimes the weather cooperation to have more.”

After a season of road trips, Nuttycombe is glad to have a home meet.

“The schedule looks sometimes glamorous, and we do have a lot of big road trips,” Nuttycombe stated. “Not everyone travels on all the road trips, but it is nice to have home meets. We’re just glad to have the one we have, and we’re going to do as good a job as we can.”

Whether it is after a long weekend of travel, or a season of road trips, home certainly is a sweet place to be.