A 48-hour travel nightmare preceded 67-point loss for SC State women’s basketball team
The final buzzer mercifully sounded at Koch Arena to cement the largest win in Wichita State women’s basketball history, but the scoreboard hardly told the story behind Tuesday’s game between the Shockers and South Carolina State.
Wichita State’s 105-38 win will be remembered in history because WSU broke a 41-year-old school record for largest margin of victory and came two points away from its single-game scoring record. But on Tuesday, in the midst of one of the worst airline traveling weeks in history, the prevailing feeling afterward was empathy toward South Carolina State.
What was originally scheduled as a Christmas Day flight to Wichita turned into a 48-hour travel nightmare, as the South Carolina State women’s basketball team was stranded in St. Louis for two straight nights and was forced to drive seven hours to Wichita on the day of Tuesday’s game, which was delayed an hour to accommodate the travel challenges, just to ensure SC State could play in a game that resulted in a 67-point loss.
“Last night, when we were trying to go through 1,000-some bags to try to find our 26 bags, that felt like a nightmare,” SC State coach Tim Eatman said. “When all of our kids got their bags, so at least we would have our uniforms to wear, then the nightmare got a little better. But overall, it’s just been really tough. Really tough on our kids mentally.”
Overcoming difficult travel arrangements is an unfortunate reality this time of the year every season at South Carolina State, a historically Black university that relies on funding its programs by collecting “guarantee game” checks on the road during non-conference play.
So it was nothing new when the team, located in Orangeburg, S.C., gathered on Christmas and made the 90-minute drive to Charleston to fly out for its road game in Wichita in two days. The trip was on schedule with the team arriving that night in St. Louis for the final connecting flight to Wichita, but that’s when the cancellations from Southwest Airlines began.
The team waited hours to receive clarification on when its flight could be rescheduled. When it became apparent a flight out wasn’t happening that night, it took more time to find a hotel with enough rooms to accommodate a large party. Eatman said the team didn’t leave the St. Louis airport until 3:30 a.m. in the early hours of Dec. 26.
With just a few hours of sleep, the players had to return to the airport hours later with hopes of catching a flight that never materialized. The team was again told it could potentially fly out that evening, but once again waited for hours in the airport and left with nothing but disappointment.
“Once they canceled our flights again, there was no more trying to take a chance on a flight and not being able to get here to play,” Eatman said. “We knew we had to look into trying to get some vans and getting out of there.”
After a second night of less-than-ideal sleep in St. Louis, Eatman was able to rent a pair of 12-passenger vans on Tuesday morning. The players piled into the vans, as the head coach and assistant Ervin Monier each drove a van and made the 7-hour trek to Wichita in time for Tuesday night’s game.
While Eatman is in his first year as SC State head coach, he’s a veteran in the coaching ranks with more than three decades of experience with stops on high-major coaching staffs like Rutgers, Boston College, Arkansas, Louisville, Kansas and Iowa.
He’s experienced high-end travel and he’s now experienced the polar opposite.
“It kind of took me back to my AAU basketball coaching days when we drove from Alabama to Connecticut to play in the first national tournament,” Eatman said with a laugh.
Eatman handled the travel ordeal better than most coaches in his position would have. Instead of rightfully feeling miserable about the bad travel luck, Eatman chose to embrace the adversity and tried to find the positives in a night after his emotionally-drained team suffered a 67-point loss at the end of a 48-hour travel nightmare.
“I really do believe this is going to help our team,” Eatman said. “It’s going to force us to jell. We’ve been around each other for basically 18 of the 24 hours in a day and that’s only going to help us become a better unit on the court together.”
And the nightmare road trip has only begun for SC State, which dropped to 1-12 on the season after Tuesday’s loss. The game in Wichita was the first of three road games in the next six days, as SC State has a game against New Mexico in Albuquerque on Thursday and a game against Furman back in its home state of South Carolina on Sunday.
The team’s commercial flight to Albuquerque on Wednesday has already been canceled, so Eatman said SC State will stay in Wichita on Tuesday night, practice at Koch Arena on Wednesday, courtesy of WSU, and then load up the vans once again and make the 10-hour drive to Albuquerque ahead of Thursday’s game.
As for flying back to South Carolina in time for the Furman game, that’s a problem Eatman has yet to solve. That will be another challenge for another day.
“The challenges on this trip are going to be tough, but if we stay together through this, I know we’re going to gain so much from this trip,” Eatman said.