LONDON — The grind is nearly over for the Arizona State football support staff. The entire season is a grind, and that will stretch until December. But this portion has proven particularly challenging, with the Sun Devils navigating a recently concluded trip to Texas A&M and the current week in London, which ends with the Big 12 showdown against Kansas on Sept. 19 at the iconic Wembley Stadium.
It amounts to a 10-day road trip spanning two continents. Much of the responsibility has fallen on Assistant Director for Operations Bryan McGinnis and Director of Football Administration Lexie Godfrey.
"You can do as much planning as you want. Things come up," McGinnis said. "You have to figure them out. Adjust quickly in real time. All to get a team to another
country to play a football game."
The Sun Devils left College Station and made a short flight to Dallas, where the team had dinner. That was also a meeting point for the rest of the traveling party, including some players, who did not travel for the Texas A&M game but were going to London.
The staff had to put much of the equipment on a plane at halftime to get it to Dallas, where it would be loaded onto another plane for the flight across the pond.
"Normally, when we travel, everything is on the truck, but we had to put some stuff on the plane to get it to Dallas to get on the bigger plane, and we ran into some weight issues," McGinnis said. "We made some necessary adjustments before the trip but had to add a half-time truck."
Godfrey arrived in London about the time the game at Texas A&M ended to ensure everything was set up properly at the Lensbury Hotel in the London suburb of Teddington. It serves as the team's lodging and practice site, with two rugby fields converted for football use on the hotel grounds.
No detail was too small.
For example, hotel accommodations are not what they are in the United States. Not all rooms have a queen- or king-size bed. Many are decked out with two single beds, slightly smaller than what are twin beds by American standards. Now imagine a 6-foot-6, 360-pound football player trying to get a good night's sleep in one of those. So Godfrey double-checked room assignments to make sure the players had rooms with bigger beds.
If anyone was stuck on a twin bed, it had to be the support staff.
Preparations began well ahead of the trip. The head chef and the hotel's banquet manager from the Lensbury traveled to Tempe to work with the staff at ASU, which feeds the players daily. McGinnis said that was perhaps the best part of the pre-trip preparations.
McGinnis said the hotel staff has been great to work with, but there are some nuances that come with the partnership. Call it the difference in the way of life.
"It's been interesting to get people here in the UK to understand college football's sense of urgency," he said. "The pace at which we work. I've had a lot of comments, `You walk very fast.' It's just a different pace here. They're like, `We'll get to it,' When we want to do things, we want to do it now. We tried to prep them as much as possible. Now that we're here, we don't think they understand that pace at which we go."
McGinnis said that equipment and game-day essentials will be transported to Wembley Stadium on Friday, the day before the game. That is also a meticulous process.
"Every single arrival of a person or an item has to be documented," he said. "So they want to know what time and what's coming. They need a comprehensive list of everything and when it gets there. It's a national monument as far as stadiums go."
The process of getting equipment and program essentials to the country started back in July. Everything had to be at the port in New York by July 30 to arrive by Sept. 12, a week before the game. That meant the school had to buy extras because it could not be without stuff in the meantime.
It also means it will take that long going back, too. McGinnis said everything won't get back to Tempe until late October. That process will be slightly easier, though. For the trip into another country, everything had to be meticulously counted and labeled to the exact number of items in each crate.
"We're not entering with foreign material. It's all US-purchased, so it's a lot easier to clear customs," McGinnis said. "You do still have to mark everything, but it's a little more lenient knowing it's US materials."
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Arizona State football is meeting challenges of international trip
