Jones' football teams travel well
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Sports Columnist
BOISE, Idaho — It was not much before midnight when the University of Hawai'i football team pulled up at its hotel here Thursday night, bounding off buses straight from a 6 1/2-hour charter flight.
For the next two-plus hours the Warriors would scurry from meeting to meeting, watching game video of today's opponent, Boise State, and reviewing their own game plan before calling it a night in the long-since slumbering Mountain Time Zone. All the while the Warriors remained on Hawai'i time, which was four hours earlier.
"(People) must think we're crazy," June Jones, the UH football coach, has observed.
And, yes, for the record, the few people still up in the early morning hours did wonder why the Warriors, the team that had come from afar, didn't make a beeline for their pillows when they had the chance.
But through this cross-time zone madness has so far come success for the Warriors. This idea of Warrior Air, transporting their time zone with them wherever they go like their luggage, has been paying dividends.
Consider that a program that had gone seven often dismal seasons and 24 consecutive Western Athletic Conference games without a conference road victory (1992-'98) before Jones arrived has won three in a row entering the showdown with Boise State.
And even in road games it has lost of late, witness the 35-32 setback at Brigham Young, UH has been very much in the game. Something that couldn't always be said in the past.
In Jones' four seasons at UH, the Warriors are 6-6 on the road — WAC and non-conference combined. To put this achievement into perspective, consider that Jones' predecessor, Fred vonAppen, was 0-12. Even two of UH's most accomplished coaches, Dick Tomey (13-14-1), and Bob Wagner (11-23-1), found the .500 mark elusive.
This week Jones chose to push the envelope a little more, bringing the Warriors in on a Thursday instead of Wednesday.
How well it works only time will tell as Jones' travel plan — both this week's and the overall, which he freely acknowledges is a combination of his own experiences plus ideas borrowed from Tomey and Wagner's time — plays out.
New this year has been the final major piece, point-to-point charter flights. Previously, the Warriors flew commercial from home to the West Coast and chartered from there to their destination. This year it has been all charter as the athletic director Herman Frazier has chosen to underwrite a major investment — costing the school about $150,000 more than what it paid for travel last year.
Perhaps just in time, too. For the Warriors are now in the midst of their sternest test, a 31,000-mile season-long road grind not lessened by what they find when they get there.
Over five road games — matching the most the school has ever played — and into some heretofore forbidding environments — BYU, El-Paso, Fresno, Rice and, for the first time, Boise — Warrior Air faces a long haul challenge.
How "crazy" the whole travel gambit is remains to be seen. If the Warriors can manage a couple more road wins because of it, they might just be "crazy" like a fox.
