PARK RIDGE, Ill. - Motorcoach operators who transport Big 10 Conference football and basketball teams to their games will find it a little easier to figure out whether a team must use ground transportation or if it's allowed to fly.
The conference has developed a new transportation policy for the two sports that names the specific conference school that each of them may fly to roundtrip, fly one way and drive the other way, or drive both ways.
The new rules are designed to eliminate confusion and be more specific than the decade-old regulations they replace. Those rules were never enforced and the new rules don't have an enforcement mechanism either.
The changes, which become effective at the start of the 2004-05 school year, only affect the school football and basketball teams. Other sports teams - baseball, hockey, track and field, tennis, swimming and others - will continue to follow the existing policy, which requires teams to travel by ground transportation if the road trip is less than 150 miles or takes less than five hours.
All 11 teams in the conference, which includes universities in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, agreed to the new arrangements.
Brad Traviolia, an associate commissioner of the Big 10, said a number of schools in the conference were not following the previous travel rule exactly in the same manner, possibly because they found it confusing.
Some were tabulating the distance from football stadium to football stadium and basketball arena to basketball arena, while others were calculating it from the city limits of the center of the city. This allowed some coaches to tell recruits their schools flew to most games, while other schools had to travel by ground transportation.
"This makes it clear," Traviolia emphasized. "We just got rid of all of the gray area and each of the schools agreed to it."
Some motorcoach operators that have university contracts for transportation services had expressed concern about the different interpretations of the rule, worrying they might be missing out on trips because teams were flying to games when they should have been driving.
Traviolia said the conference does not enforce travel rules, but rather expects each school to follow them on an honor system. "There aren't necessarily any penalties but they have to answer to their peers," he said. "If they don't follow them, the word gets around and the others will speak up because everyone is expected to follow them."
Travilia said each university has individuals who handle travel for the different sports, and he suggested coach operators call the school athletic departments and ask to speak to the person or persons in charge of travel arrangements. These individuals should be able to provide a list of conference cities each school has to drive to and those to which it can fly.