IOWA CITY, Iowa — With Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten in August, the league has already finalized new scheduling models for football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball that prioritize competitive balance, geography and rivalries. The next scheduling phase involves Olympic sports with the same key tenets steering the process as their higher-profile colleagues, but cost and travel have an even greater impact.
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On Feb. 19-20, Big Ten officials and school athletics administrators will meet at league headquarters in Rosemont, Ill. to discuss and perhaps finalize scheduling principles for fall Olympic sports. The spring sports likely will settle plans in May. With different priorities guiding each sport, scheduling ideas have ranged from true rotations to regional preference to even some sports on the same campus traveling together to save costs.
“In terms of some of the efficiencies, I don’t think that has been discussed as much because you’re talking about principles right now and not dates,” Iowa athletic director Beth Goetz said. “So if you’re going to figure out if there can be shared travel, you’re going to have to have the actual schedule in front of you to do that.”
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Cost will be an increasingly relevant factor in travel now that the Big Ten extends across the continent. According to financial documents obtained by The Athletic through open-records requests, Big Ten public schools spent between $7.6 million and $16.5 million on travel during the 2023 fiscal year. Football teams that qualified for the College Football Playoff or Final Four events spent the most, such as Michigan ($16.5 million), Ohio State ($14.2 million) and Iowa ($12.3 million). The lower end included Illinois ($7.6 million).
Starting this fall, expenses will soar for the West Coast newcomers and grow for the Big Ten holdovers with teams from every sport likely heading to the Pacific time zone at least once. For some sports, the way to keep costs down is to swap some discretionary trips for conference travel.
For instance, there are discussions for baseball teams in the Central or Eastern time zones to fly west for their spring break and stay for an entire week to play some combination of USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington on consecutive weekends with a few nonconference games in the middle. Big Ten baseball clubs now play eight league series — all on weekends.
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Softball has additional challenges, in part because USC does not have a softball program. Currently, softball teams play seven three-game weekend series and one two-game midweek series. In 2025, it’s likely softball will add another series or possibly multiple single games against one another at a hub in Arizona, Florida or Southern California.
“Say we’re playing Washington and UCLA, and then Rutgers is coming down and playing Michigan and Minnesota,” Iowa softball coach Renee Gillispie said. “We will all be at the same site and playing all at the same time.
“We just hope that they’re not going to take us to the East Coast and the West Coast the same year.”
Season is upon us…#Hawkeyes pic.twitter.com/aAIBki6kil
— Iowa Softball (@iowasoftball) February 7, 2024
For softball, the current geographically based schedule will likely see changes. Iowa, for example, faces Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nebraska every year, all of which are bus trips. This spring, the Hawkeyes will travel to Michigan for the first time since Gillispie became head coach in 2019 and have yet to play at Ohio State in her tenure. The goal in future years is that every softball player travels to every Big Ten campus at least once in a four-year period.
That all comes with a greater cost. For sports like baseball and softball, an extra conference flight could remove a nonconference flight in favor of a long bus trip to keep the books balanced.
“Is it worth an additional investment of time or resources to send you out there as opposed to, ‘Hey, I can get over to Nashville?” Goetz said. “It may not be sunny and 80, but that opportunity exists.
“We’re trying to do that in partnership with a coach. It’s not to say ‘Hey, there is no travel; you’ve got to stay in this region.’ But just having more dialogue about why we make those decisions and nonconference schedule that we do.”
(Photo of Wisconsin volleyball: Jamie Schwaberow / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
