UH's foe sky high for rare plane ride
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
Perhaps never before at Appalachian State University has the battle for the eighth defensive back spot on the football roster been so fierce or the competition for the sixth wide receiver berth been so intense.
Over the past week, they say football practice had taken on a no-holds-barred, NFL-like last-cut ferocity at some positions.
"It has probably been the most competitive camp here — ever," said Roachel Laney, the athletic director, who has spent 28 years at the school.
Of course, never before has there been a game at Hawai'i, Saturday night's season-opener at Aloha Stadium, to look forward to and just 63 roster spots allotted for the trip.
Since March, when the game was first announced, this has ceased to be just a road trip and become a once-in-a-lifetime journey for the school perched 3,333 feet up in the Appalachian Mountains, a Hail Mary pass from North Carolina's border with Tennessee and two hours away from Charlotte, N.C.
Where the Division I-AA Mountaineers might suit up as many as 100 players for a home game and take 80 to 90 on the road to a nonconference game at I-A Clemson or Wake Forest, the school's first regular-season plane trip in 27 years has put a premium on hard-earned roster spots.
"The competition these last four or five days, especially between who was going to be like the eighth and ninth defensive back, stood out," defensive coordinator John Wiley said.
Not until last night, when coaches met with the 63 chosen ones to go over trip plans and asked how many had been on a plane before, were they able to put a number to the novelty of this trip. "Only about 15 or 20 raised their hands," Wiley said.
Even the prospect of Thursday's pre-dawn departure from the Boone, N.C., campus and the arduous 16-hour, 4,948-mile trip to Honolulu has not dimmed enthusiasm among the players, some of whom haven't seen a body of water much larger than High Rock Lake before.
After rattling down the highways of the southeast U.S. in its fleet of black buses with gold side stripes during six- and seven-hour bus rides for Southern Conference games, jetting across a continent has taken on the air of high adventure for a school that has rarely ventured outside the eastern time zone for anything but NCAA playoffs.
Not since 1976 when the Mountaineers played at Indiana's Ball State — their first and last regular-season plane trip, according to Laney — has the school traveled by commercial flight. I-AA playoff appearances at Boise State (1994) and Montana (2000) were charter flights.
"Coaches tend to think about all the problems of traveling," Wiley said. "The players, they are just looking forward to the trip."
Especially, it seems, that last defensive back and wide receiver.
