LONDON — It isn't often your college football rooting interest has a chance to play overseas. Arizona State football fans are embracing the chance to take a road trip like no other.
The Sun Devils (1-1) are here to square off against Big 12 foe Kansas (1-1) at 9 a.m. MST (5 p.m. here in London) at historic Wembley Stadium on Sept. 19 in the Union Jack Classic. It will be the first college football game played in England, although Big 12 teams have played in Ireland the past two years.
ASU sold out its initial allotment of 6,000 tickets, then sold another 3,000. Just how many Sun Devils faithful will be on hand is harder to figure because tickets were also available on the Union Jack Classic website, and some travelers for each school could have
purchased tickets from there.
Will Novak will be working, sort of. He'll be going with his mother, Sandra Dean, who lives in San Marcos, California. He responded to an advertisement the Union Jack Classic organizers put out looking for volunteers to post social media content leading up to the game. It isn't a paid job, but they'll get tickets to the game.
"They were looking for social media influencers," he said. "I said I'm not sure I'm that, but if you're looking for a dorky dad and his mom, I'm your guy."
Novak is already drumming up ideas. One is to ask man-on-the-street-type interviews, throw out some names, and ask if the person is a member of the British Parliament or an ASU football player. He singles out defensive back Nigel Pringle and long snapper Tyler Wigglesworth as players whose names might pass for prominent Englishmen.
Novak grew up going to ASU games and remembers his mother hoisting him over the fence so he could run around on the field and celebrate after the 1996 victory over Cal qualified the Sun Devils for the Rose Bowl.
Like most Sun Devils fans, he is excited to have Dillingham heading the program now.
"It's so nice to have a coach who is as passionate about the school as we are," he said. "That really resonates with everybody. He wants to be here. He's not going anywhere, and that also makes it easier for people to get behind him."
Jasen Roos, a 2012 ASU graduate, is making the trip with seven other family members: his wife, Ashley; their four children, ages 9 to 21; and his parents. The Mesa resident said he started planning the excursion almost as soon as it was announced more than a year ago. They booked an Airbnb near the stadium.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he said. "This will be our vacation for the next two years. With kids in college, who knows when we would be able to do anything like this again. We can't wait."
Roos admits the trip comes with a few challenges. One daughter is enrolled in Grand Canyon and taking classes online while living in Hawaii, so she'll have to return to the States before the family departs. The day after the family gets back, Roos will be on a plane again and traveling to Utah for the wedding of a close friend.
"We'll do whatever we need to do," he said. "These opportunities don't come around often."
While the Roos family planned the event for more than a year, Joseph and Amy Pizzolato, who met at ASU in 2015 and graduated in 2017, only put the trip together in the last month. They had lived in Scottsdale until relocating to Knoxville, Tennessee, a year ago.
The two are planning a five-day trip with a side trip to Paris to see Celine Dion at her new residency there. Like many other ASU supporters, they plan to make a pit stop at some of the sites made famous in the Apple TV hit "Ted Lasso."
"It's going to be a two-for-one for us," Joseph Pizzolato said. "We were watching 'Good Morning America' and saw that Celine Dion was going to be there the same week of the game. We just took it from there and made it happen."
Travis Breedlove attended ASU in the late 1990s and played the saxophone in the marching band, while his wife, Jaime, played the clarinet. That's how the two met. Their son, Jackson, is now a freshman and also plays in the band. Breedlove has remained active in the alumni band, which occasionally performs at home games at Mountain America Stadium, and he says it is a close-knit fraternity that includes recent band members as well as those from decades past.
Breedlove, an ASU season ticket holder, says about 17 alumni band members plan to make the trip, although they won't be traveling together. Breedlove is among several ASU fans who have said they're planning a side trip to Scotland as well.
"It just kind of spread," Breedlove said. "We wanted to go, and then we talked to some others, and they wanted to go too. And then they talked to other people. Next thing you know, we've got this group going."
Among the others going is Rik Wahlrab, a 1981 ASU graduate and now a chiropractor from San Juan Capistrano, California.
He was looking forward to the trip because his last chance to see the Sun Devils play in person was when they squared off against UCLA at the Rose Bowl in 2023, in what has since been known as the "swinging gate game." Dillingham resorted to that seldom-used formation because injuries had decimated his team. The Sun Devils won a game most thought they had no chance to win.
"That game right there convinced me he's a genius," he laughed.
Wahlrab and wife, Rebeccah, are planning some side excursions to Scotland and Paris as well.
"We love to travel, so this was right up our alley," he said. "We heard about this, and she said, `We have to go,' even before I said it."
Some are turning it into an extra-long road trip. Rhonda Clark of Chandler made the trip to watch the Sun Devils at Texas A&M, then left from there to come here for the Union Jack Classic. She is known as "Dr. Sun Devil" in ASU circles and frequently posts pictures on social media.
"I was on the fence about going. Then I started talking to more and more fans who were going so I decided to do it," she said. "I would have kicked myself if I didn't go."
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona State football fans embrace a rare chance to watch London game
