How Alabama football goes on the road and makes it home: 'A lot goes into it'

Alabama and Wisconsin will kick off at 11 a.m. CT in the showcase game of Saturday’s Week 3 college football schedule. But what did it take for the Crimson Tide to get to their first road game of the season?

It’s a much bigger operation than most fans may realize.

Between the Delta 757 plane, a 53-foot 18-wheeler, two charter buses and more, around 250 people from the athletic department will make the trip. The 867-mile trek is the team’s longest road trip this season, but no matter the distance, road games are a huge undertaking.

“It’s extremely stressful to take this ship on the road,” said Ellis Ponder, Alabama’s football chief operating officer. “You’re relying on so many different people, outside entities that don’t necessarily work for Alabama football. We’ve gotten to the point where we take our buses for home games to away games regardless of where we play because I don’t want to deal with some group of people that I’ve never met.

“There’s a ton of things that the average fan has no concept of. They just turn their TV on and the Tide is in Madison in white jerseys, but it is a huge undertaking.”

Saturday’s game has a couple of extra layers to it. It’s Alabama’s first road game under coach Kalen DeBoer. Plus, it’s the program’s first trip to Wisconsin in 96 years. Traveling in the SEC to Auburn, Baton Rouge, La., or Knoxville, Tenn., comes with some level of comfort.

But this weekend will be a new experience, and it’s planned accordingly. The menu for Friday night’s dinner in Madison was chosen several months ago.

Kalen DeBoer will coach his first road game with Alabama on Saturday against Wisconsin. (Gary Cosby Jr. / USA Today)

“Planning for away trips starts immediately after the postseason,” said Alison VandenBerghe, Alabama’s first-year director of football performance nutrition. “So when I got here (in January) is basically when the planning for this game started. The things that we really have to fine-tune and oversee is menu development, special diets, food preparation, packing the food and storage, working with travel coordinators, delivery of food — whether that’s for the bus, light, at the stadium and then making sure that we have like hydration stations kind of set up all throughout that as well. A lot goes into it.”

So how will things be different under DeBoer? After 17 years with Nick Saban as their coach, the Tide had a regimented road schedule.

Friday night dinner was at 6:15 p.m. There were two double buffet lines in the center of the ballroom — staff on one side and players on the other. The head coach’s table included six seats for Saban, the offensive coordinator, the defensive coordinator, the special teams coordinator, the offensive line coach and the defensive backs coach.

From there, the schedule worked backward.

“We based everything off eating dinner at 6:15 p.m.,” said Ponder, who is in his fifth year. “It didn’t matter if we were playing in Bangladesh. We needed to leave in time enough to eat dinner in Bangladesh at 6:15 p.m. on Friday.”

Saban was a stickler for the meal room to be set his way, so much so that Alabama sent staff members ahead of time to check the hotel facilities. It will be the same setup this weekend, although DeBoer hasn’t shown a preference for such things, but there will be changes.

Dinner will be a little later than 6:15 p.m., now tentatively scheduled for 6:35 p.m. Under Saban, the team meeting was held in Tuscaloosa before the team’s departure. Now, the team will meet after dinner, followed by other position meetings. A Saban-led team would see a movie if the game was late in the day on Saturday. That won’t continue under DeBoer.

The synergy between the Alabama operations staff and outside resources needed to pull off a road trip is the difference between a clean operation and a messy situation. Winning the game is a task in itself, but the goal beforehand is making sure that the hours leading up to kickoff and during the game are as comfortable as possible.

“Our coaches should only have to worry about recruiting and coaching,” Ponder said. “We’ve got other people to worry about all of the other stuff.”

“Everyone always wants to talk about the police escorts.” — Shane Burgess

It’s the number one question that opposing teams have for Burgess, Wisconsin athletics department’s director of event management. On Friday, the Dane County sheriff’s department will escort Wisconsin’s team to its hotel before meeting Alabama at the airport.

It won’t be a large escort, according to Ponder: “The way they escort us (in Tuscaloosa) or anywhere in the state of Alabama, you’d think Pope Francis was rolling through here.”

But the team will have what it needs because Burgess sees his team almost as a neutral party, serving both the home and away teams. Part of the package of information for Alabama includes a map of the visiting locker room, a polarizing topic in team travel.

“I would imagine some would think there’s some gamesmanship,” Burgess said. “I’m proud to think we have some very good visiting accommodations at Wisconsin. We definitely make sure the heat and air conditioning is working.”

Wisconsin’s lockers are mounted to the wall, which gives Alabama’s equipment staff flexibility in setting up the space. One plus at Wisconsin is that there appears to be a decent-sized space in the middle of the room, good for setting up position meetings in pregame and at halftime.

“Obviously they’re built for a reason like this,” Alabama director of equipment operations Jeff Springer said. “(Wisconsin) looks like it’ll be better than some of the places where we go in our conference. But until I get there on Friday morning and I actually see him put my eyes on it — that’s always the stress of it.”

Springer will be on board the 18-wheeler that travels to Madison on Thursday with student managers, student trainers, the video/graphics team, etc., on the charter buses. Once they arrive after a projected 14-hour drive, it’ll take two to three hours to turn the visiting locker room into a home for several hours on Saturday.

Burgess noted that the Big Ten has been “very passionate” about locker room accommodations in recent years. In the SEC, conversations about establishing minimum requirements are constant talking points.

“That’s all part of it, going on the road,” Springer said. “A lot of these visiting locker rooms are built specifically to cause you issues and make you uncomfortable, make you have to adjust what you do. It’s all part of going on the road and dealing with it. We do the best that we can to make sure that those issues are maybe downgraded.”

A few people from the operations and nutrition staff also travel on Thursdays ahead of the trips. They need to scope out every aspect of the scene from the airport arrival procedure, hotel logistics (the check-in procedure and checking everyone’s key card), making sure meeting rooms/dining areas are positioned correctly and overseeing the food preparation and more.

Ponder pointed to one road trip to Texas A&M when the air conditioning in the locker room wasn’t working. After that, Alabama hired local groups to supply AC units to needed areas.

“Things like hot water (in the hotel), we’re checking all that,” Ponder said. “And it’s not like people are doing anything intentionally. Stuff happens. And it’s our job to catch things before the team does.”

Camp Randall Stadium will host Alabama for the first time since 1928 when the Crimson Tide face off with Wisconsin on Saturday. (Jeff Hanisch / USA Today)

The goal for the traveling staff is to make sure the athletes are ready to perform. Part of that is keeping the players nourished at every checkpoint. VandenBerghe and the dietitian staff and team chef complete that mission on two fronts: with the team and working ahead at the location.

Breakfast at the team facility is on Friday mornings in Tuscaloosa, and there’s a grab-and-go meal as the team boards the plane. When it arrives, it will head straight to the hotel and team dinner. After 9 p.m., there will be a snack available. On Saturdays, there will be an early risers breakfast, and the standard pregame meal will have breakfast and lunch options.

The team won’t be in a position to eat a full meal again until after the game, so VandenBerghe’s staff will have an assortment of sandwiches, smoothies and more throughout the game and at halftime.

Alabama usually doesn’t deviate from what it serves, but there’s a twist wherever the team travels. Because the Tide will be in Wisconsin, cheese curds have been added to the Friday night menu.

“We try to have our more fibrous vegetables on Friday,” said VandenBerghe, who has been with DeBoer since 2021, also working as the director of sports nutrition at Fresno State and Washington. “We take away that fiber on Saturday because it’s not as easy to digest. Pasta is always really easy on someone’s stomach, but we’ll do an alfredo Friday night because it’s heavier, then marinara on Saturday because that sits much better in someone’s stomach.

“It’s our first away game, and our stomachs can get anxious. Although that’s not like a dietary restriction, we still have to take into consideration that when our stomachs are anxious we may not be able to handle food very well. Knowing that’s coming, myself and my staff, we just have to plan for that and have maybe easier types of food.”

Feeding the team on the road is a multi-pronged effort of food that’s stored and taken by Alabama, coordinating with the hosting hotel and arranging food deliveries to the stadium on game day. The nutrition staff that gets there a day early is responsible for getting game-day food items stored at the stadium and setting up a hotel trunk for the players’ arrival with different beverages, liquids, hydration packets, vitamins, etc. There will be multiple meetings/walkthroughs with the hotel kitchen to ensure quality.

And the work doesn’t stop when the game starts.

“Obviously when you’re in the middle of the game, you’re not really thinking about food,” VandenBerghe said. “It might just be drinking a certain type of liquid that we offer because it’s really easy to digest. We offer these energy chews, fruit snacks; we’ll have gummy worms out there. The guys know throughout the week to practice what they eat, and then once we get to the game day, it’s really easy to get them to eat something.”

Fourth-ranked Alabama’s first road game is monumental. Saturday will be the first time Wisconsin has hosted a top-10 nonconference opponent since it hosted No. 3 Miami in 1989.

“These guys probably haven’t been there,” DeBoer said. “Maybe a couple guys from the Midwest that have seen that or been on a visit maybe at one point. It’s going to be a great atmosphere up there. I think it’s one that when you’re preparing to go play those games, and we’ll, of course, have that many times here with the SEC schedule too, that hostile environment, taking it on and just kind of knowing that it’s you versus everyone there.”

This is the first road trip with DeBoer for many in the program but not VandenBerghe, who can attest to his focus on the details when traveling for a game.

“He does a really good job of communicating anything that he does want in particular,” VandenBerghe said. “He’s just focused on getting these guys’ minds right, getting them prepped for the game and just allowing his team to do what we need to do to make sure that we can execute everything.”

Winning on Saturday in Madison or later on in Knoxville, Baton Rouge or Norman, Okla., another unfamiliar location, is a full-scale effort that begins well before the game. A lot of the groundwork is done behind the scenes that fans may not be familiar with.

In most cases, that’s the preference. It means everything went according to plan.

“Menus are set, the hotel knows what we’re going to be eating and drinking,” Ponder said. “The police know our timing, our itinerary and when we have movements, etc. Now it’s just the fulfillment of it.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Alabama football)