High School football playoff travel horror stories

It's now back in Stuart at some Aquatics Center. Our teams just drove 576.9 miles for one day of swimming. Still, at least it's not Ft. Lauderdale.

 

more fun UP travel from the college ranks where there is a possible D2 first round matchup between Texas A&M Commerce and Michigan Tech, 1,275 miles away.

 

Once I had to drive about an hour to cover an event. When I got there, it was a high school football game.

Still gives me chills.

 

About 400 miles as a young man with another guy. Yes, we had to share a motel room.
The only thing worse than the game was listening to dude talk about high school football for several hours.

 

If we're getting into actual bad trips, and not just long trips, that's a whole other ballgame.
I once had to drive about six hours to Florence, Ala., to cover the Division II national championship game. As I'm about to get off the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, the temperature light in my car pops on. Within a mile, the engine is steaming from a blown water pump.
All of this is happening at 4:15 p.m. on a Friday in early December, in the age before cellphones.
I got very, very lucky, though. I somehow managed to limp it a few miles onto Highway 72 and found the one garage in that part of the world that not only located the part I needed in about 10 minutes (from a local junkyard), but wasn't busy, was still open, and was able to replace it in less than an hour.
If you're at all familiar with northwestern Alabama/northeastern Mississippi, this was nothing short of an early Christmas miracle. I'd probably gone an hour on the Trace without seeing another car. If the water pump had blown even five miles sooner, at that time of day and that time of year, I might have been eaten by wolves (or at least stranded in freezing temperatures 10-15 miles from the nearest sign of civilization, with no chance of getting the car fixed before Monday even if I made it there).

 

In D2 football, Texas A&M Commerce didn't make it so Michigan Tech's first round opponent is. . . .Angelo State, who will get to make the 1,530 mile trip to Houghton from San Angelo, Texas

 

The one big drawback to a fully-seeded playoff system for high schools is the possiblity of some awfully long trips for each round of the playoffs.

My sister lives in St. Francisville, La., which is 30 miles north of Baton Rouge and the high school there had a first-round game at Westlake, which is on the other side of Lake Charles. Compared to some states that's not necessarily a long trip, but for Louisiana it's a fair trek.

Mississippi still does a regional/sub-state system for its playoffs, and while it has its drawbacks, it doesn't lend itself to too many long drives. The longest trip I'll make this year is to Starkville, about three hours, for the state championships, if one of our teams makes it (and we usually have one or two that do).

 

Don't envy some of you guys. Farthest I've traveled was a 260 mile round-trip. Drive time was about 2.5 hours each way. It was a Saturday night football playoff game. IIRC, the game wasn't over until after 11. I filed from a nearby fast food place with wifi after midnight. I got home at about 3.

 

The southern half of Mississippi is a little more reasonable than the north, Albert. Any time one of our schools has to go to Tupelo, which is the anti-Tahoe (it's four hours from everywhere), there's plenty of groans. Because of how the regions were split up, you also have Starkville and Columbus having to make several two-hour drives to the Jackson area each season.
Some of the 1A regions are even weirder. Any system that forces Nanih Waiya (in Louisville, which is about 30 minutes from Starkville) to compete for a South State championship is messed up.

 

This wasn't a high school game but still was pretty bad.

I woke up at 2 a.m. of the Billy Cundiff AFC Championship game to catch a bus from Baltimore area to Foxborough. I used halftime to track down fan story needed to have newspaper pay for my trip and wrote fan story, sidebar and part of the game story in the second half.

Once Cundiff lined up for the kick, I figured it would give me time to polish the game story in overtime. Nope. I plugged in stats to fan story and sider and sent immediately and tried to write a good lede for game story and sent that in before getting quotes from locker room. I called in quotes from bus ride back to Baltimore area. I didn't get home until 5 a.m., when I picked up the Baltimore Sun on my sidewalk and turned on ESPN News highlights of the game to make sure he actually missed that kick.

 

Some of my colleagues in West Texas or the Panhandle would laugh at this thread as sometimes a district game for them can be ridiculous. Then the first round of the playoff almost always had Midland/Odessa vs. Fort Worth and Arlington schools, a 300-plus distance.
But for those of us in the rest of the state, usually the road trips aren't that bad. But about a decade ago I had an unusual weekend, covering four games in three days.
Game 1 was a HS playoff game on a Thursday with 7 p.m. start in East Texas (Lufkin). Game 2 was a Friday night playoff game in Tyler. Game 3 was an 11 a.m. Saturday playoff game in Dallas, and Game 4 was a UT night home game (7 p.m. I think) . After finding a place to park in Austin (NEVER FUN) and hauling my stuff to the press box I got to my seat about 1 minute to kick off, and spent the 1Q and some of the 2Q writing my gamer for that morning game.
In all over 600 miles and two hotel rooms.