Cal’s move to ACC: AD Knowlton discusses top issues facing Bears

BERKELEY — Cal will make its first trip east as a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference when its men’s soccer team visits North Carolina State on Sept. 6. It’s a 2,400-mile flight that will have taken more than a year to complete.

The Bears officially became members of the ACC on Friday, following merely a century-plus in the Pac-12. From the upper suites of Memorial Stadium, where fans can look out at the San Francisco Bay as it flows into the Pacific, Cal is now part of a conference named after the Atlantic.

But if that was a hard swallow for many, the new logistics of playing games in North Carolina, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania create a range of concrete issues which held hostage the attention of the athletic department the past 12 months.

“We couldn’t be more excited about joining the ACC,” said Cal athletic director Jim Knowlton, who plans to invite ACC commissioner Jim Phillips to the Bears’ first conference home game Oct. 5 against Miami. “It’s going to be a festival to celebrate this new conference.”

The occasion may also be a brief exhale following 12 months of work to get this thing figured out.

“Obviously a lot of it was around the logistics of travel, but there were also conversations about academics, the wellness piece of it, scheduling,” said Josh Hummel, a senior associate AD who was hands-on daily with the project. “There were probably more questions than answers over the course of the first six months.”

“And all that is happening,” Knowlton added, “at a time when we’re seeing radical, revolutionary change in the model of intercollegiate athletics.”

Here are the challenges Knowlton, his staff and Cal’s coaches took on, and solutions they hope will make this work:

TRAVEL

Cal sponsors 30 sports and for 18 of them travel will either be unaffected by the move to the ACC or minimally impacted. Six Cal programs, including water polo, will remain in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. Others, such as track and field, swimming and golf, will compete in ACC championship events but will conduct their regular seasons much as they always have, often staying close to home.

For the others — including football, basketball, baseball, softball and soccer — flights to Eugene, Oregon will be replaced by Syracuse, New York. Football will fly nearly 21,000 miles for four ACC road games (one of them at SMU in Dallas) and a non-conference game at Auburn, and its equipment truck will depart no later than Monday for each road trip in order to arrive by Wednesday or Thursday.

The football team travels by charter and the Bears will utilize a Delta 767-300 wide-body jet that seats more than 200 and offers amenities including a limited number of lie-down suites. Coach Justin Wilcox said those will be distributed on a merit basis.

Perhaps more stressful are the travel requirements of baseball, which will play five three-game ACC road series, and softball, which will have four. Those teams likely will depart the Bay Area on Wednesday for a Friday-Saturday-Sunday series, returning home late after the final game.

ACADEMICS

Even as college athletics become essentially professional, with schools allowed to directly pay athletes beginning a year from now, those same athletes will remain students with classes and exams.

To accommodate those demands, teams will travel with tutors, learning specialists and test proctors, as needed, Hummel said. Athletes will meet with professors at the start of each semester to go over their travel schedules and arrange to watch lectures live remotely or on tape.

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL WELLNESS

Knowlton fully appreciates the stress athletes will face stemming from how academics are impacted by travel. The athletic department has utilized sleep and nutrition experts to give their athletes every advantage, but there is no avoiding this will be a huge challenge.

“I think we’re very concerned,” acknowledged Knowlton, while pointing to support provided by Cal’s Cameron Institute for Student-Athlete Development with its four mental performance coaches. “We’ve got resources that will help our student-athletes deal with the additional challenges of road trips.”

FINANCES

Looming over all the change is the financial piece. The recent settlement (still to be officially approved by a judge) of an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA will allow athletic departments to directly pay their athletes as much as $23.1 million each year beginning in the fall of 2025.

Cal will receive a $10 million “Calimony” payment for three years from Big Ten-bound UCLA, related to the Bruins’ role in dismantling the Pac-12 and the impact it has on the Bears. But ACC newcomers Cal, Stanford and SMU will get a significantly discounted share of the conference’s media rights deal with TV over the first nine years.

Added to Cal’s ongoing athletic department financial challenges, all of it adds up to a daunting fiscal picture in Berkeley.

Asked this past week how Cal can make this work, Knowlton admitted, “That’s the question of the day.”

Knowlton believes new university chancellor Rich Lyons, formerly the dean of the Haas School of Business, will be an ally for athletics. “He is going to be a fabulous partner as we attack this new challenge,” Knowlton said. “The commitment from this university has been incredible. We’re working to make sure we can continue to set up our student-athletes for success.”

BEST-LAID PLANS

Knowlton used the words “meticulous” and “proactive” to describe how Cal has approached its planning for its transition to the ACC. He and Hummel also know there will be glitches, surprises they could not anticipate.

“There is no 100-page guide to how you plan in the Atlantic Coast Conference after being in the Pac-12 Conference for 100 years,” Hummel said.

Andrew McGraw, Cal football’s chief of staff, traveled to each ACC destination to scout the airport, hotel, travel routes and the stadium. A sport administrator will accompany each team on its first trip east to provide eyes on the ground.

Knowlton wants to hear from athletes with their concerns and complaints.

“As you can imagine, their feedback is usually instantaneous,” he said.

There will be bumps in the road, Hummel knows. “We have a plan, but again it’s a plan,” he said. “We’re going to tweak it as we go.”