Warriors’ travel predicament begs questions

LOGAN, Utah » Things have gotten so bad for the University of Hawaii football team that even making it to the game on time has become a question.

Sure, this isn’t the easiest place in the world to get to — and, yes no place is easy travel from Hawaii.

Logan is up in the mountains and it’s about 80 miles away from the big town with the big airport, Salt Lake City.

And UH, like everyone trying to get into or out of LAX on Friday, was held hostage because of a man with a gun and a horrible tragedy.

So it wasn’t until late Friday that the Rainbow Warriors boarded a charter flight in Southern California they hoped would get them to Ogden, Utah, by 2 a.m. today.

Kickoff is scheduled for 2 p.m., a few miles up the road here in Logan, and the Aggies weren’t sounding like they cared to change it, especially with TV considerations.

Can’t blame them. It’s not their fault.

It’s not UH’s, either — that this happened. But why was the team in Los Angeles to begin with?

BAD THINGS OCCUR on the road. You don’t expect anything this terrible and you can’t plan for it specifically, but it’s an example of how unpredictable things are when traveling.

The best you can do is simplify your plan.

You don’t have to be a geometry ace to understand that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. There are direct flights from Honolulu to Salt Lake City. I was on one of them Wednesday night.

But apparently that is out of the question for the football team because the airline that is a major corporate partner does not fly to SLC.

Charter it all the way?

Can’t afford it … one reason, the budget is strapped paying for other school’s charters to fly to Hawaii. You want an example of irony? There it is.

AT LEAST the team had it somewhat better than the athletic director, who was stuck on a plane Friday. The Rainbow Warriors never did get to the airport before it got locked down, so they hung out at the hotel and the adjacent mall and did the tape review and the meetings they were supposed to do here in Utah.

But whether or not the all-clear would be sounded, and the charter would get back to LAX and get them to Utah by 2 a.m., had to be a lingering question for all concerned.

I asked the athletic director why the team was in Los Angeles on Friday and not already in Utah to begin with.

"Don’t know, but it doesn’t matter," Jay answered in a text message from his seat in a stationary tube on the tarmac. "It is what it is."

"Don’t know" is not a good answer from the athletic director.

Maybe this is not as bad as the previous coach having the team spending days and nights needlessly in Las Vegas before and after games — sometimes games not even against UNLV. But it’s definitely something that needs to be looked at. Everyone knows LAX can become a stagnant mess even when it isn’t a murder scene.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783 or on Twitter as @dave_reardon.