Hoos Leave Nothing to Chance on West Coast Trip

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — On the bus ride to its hotel Thursday, the University of Virginia football team passed Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the former home of the NFL’s Raiders and such legends as Howie Long, Marcus Allen, Gene Upshaw and Ted Hendricks.

The Cavaliers won’t see the inside of that historic stadium on this trip, but they’ll become well-acquainted with another Bay Area venue on Saturday. At 3:45 p.m. ET, in an ACC game to air on ESPN2, 15^th-ranked Virginia (7-1, 4-0) takes on the Cal Golden Bears (5-3, 2-2) at California Memorial Stadium in Berkeley.

This will be the Wahoos’ first game in this state since 2015, when they lost to UCLA at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and head coach Tony Elliott and his staff planned extensively for this road trip, taking input from the team’s nutritionists, strength and conditioning coaches, and athletic trainers.

The Hilldrup truck carrying most of the team’s equipment left Charlottesville, Va., and headed west on Sunday. It made it to the Bay Area on Tuesday. The team arrived on Thursday, a day earlier than usual for road games.

Ross Ferrell and his assistant, Haylie Beck, oversee nutrition for the football program, and they made sure players had extra water, electrolytes and Gatorade on the nearly five-and-a-half-hour flight.

Adam Smotherman is the team’s head strength and conditioning coach. He and Elliott met several times, Smotherman said Friday, “just talking about what this trip was going to look like. And he’s been awesome, as he always is. We’ve had a really good plan with what we want to do from a physical standpoint.”

During a typical game week, UVA players will lift weights on Monday and Wednesday. This week, Smotherman said, his staff put them through a less strenuous workout on Wednesday, “knowing that they were going to be sitting on a plane and sitting on buses and all those things.

“The biggest thing is making sure your horses can race fast when it’s time to get to the race. So we took a little bit off of them from that standpoint. We got ‘em up, got ‘em moving around yesterday morning for our normal Thursday practice. So that got them feeling good. And then we flew.”

After a bus ride through rush-hour traffic, the Cavaliers checked into their hotel rooms around 5:30 p.m. PT on Thursday. After dinner, the players gathered in one of the hotel ballrooms for a light exercise session, Smotherman said.

“We wanted to keep them up a little bit and kind of get their body clocks adjusted as much as we could,” he said. “So we did some mobility work, we did some stretches, we did some foam rolling, different things like that, just getting their bodies feeling good. And then when they got up this morning, it was kind of a normal game from here on out. We will add in a little bit of movement and stretching today, just to get them bending. I’m a big believer that movement is medicine, so if you want to you want to feel better, you want to perform better, you’ve got to keep moving, you’ve got to keep bending.”

Like Elliott, Smotherman came to UVA from Clemson after the 2021 season. This will be his first regular-season game on the West Coast, Smotherman said, but he’s been out here for postseason games.

Even so, Smotherman reached out this year “to some strength coaches at some other ACC schools that had played at Cal, at Stanford and different West Coast schools, and picked their brains on some things and kind of put all that information together for Coach Elliott. I’m very blessed to have great colleagues in the profession, where we all bounce ideas off each other and share ideas. And so everybody that I talked to was very willing to share and help us kind of formulate our plan.”

UVA’s staff is thankful that the game is not late at night. “Absolutely,” Smotherman said. “I think that’s beneficial, because on game day we can get up and it’s like a normal kickoff. And then also as a coach, obviously you’re focused on the moment, but you’ve got to have a plan for what’s coming too, and so I think that allows us to get back [to Grounds] pretty much at the normal time we would get back if we had a road game at night [on the East Coast].”

The Hoos are scheduled to arrive back in Charlottesville in the early morning Sunday. “And so our Monday lift will look a little bit different than it normally does,” Smotherman said, “to mitigate some of the tightness from traveling and things like that. But then we’ll be rolling.”

At his weekly media availability at the Hardie Center, Elliott was asked about planning for this journey.

“The staff’s done a great job of tapping into the resources of not just college but NFL resources about making the West Coast trip,” Elliott said Tuesday. “And so, yes, we’ve had conversations about what’s the right timing? When do you go? How do you get acclimated to the time change? What’s the meal schedule? Should you get out there and do some stretching? Do you want to have a fast Friday practice? What’s the best combination?

“And so we took all that information and evaluated it and then also looked at where our team is right now to help us finalize our plan to travel out west.”

The Atlantic Coast Conference added Cal, Stanford and SMU in the summer of 2024, meaning the league’s members now must regularly deal with the logistical challenges of cross-country trips for multiple sports. In football, UVA is scheduled to return to the West Coast in 2028 for a game against Stanford in Palo Alto.

“I’m really, really grateful and appreciative of all the folks that don’t get recognized,” Elliott said, “for the tremendous amount of work that’s gone into trying to make this happen.”

UVA, which did not face either of the West Coast schools in 2024, is playing both this season. The Hoos hammered Stanford 48-20 at Scott Stadium on Sept. 20. Now comes an opportunity for them to impress on the other side of the country.

Elliott said he’s eager for the Cavaliers to display “the brand of football that we play: fast, intelligent, tough … And I think we all know that the Virginia brand, outside of football, it’s global. It’s from coast to coast and all around the world. And now we are trying to create something from a football perspective that is synonymous with that. So I’m just excited to be able to showcase that in a different market, and I think that we have a lot of things that can be attractive to folks all over the country.”

Cal is coming off a two-overtime loss to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The Golden Bears’ standouts include quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, only the second true freshman in FBS history to pass for at least 200 yards in each of his first eight college games.

Sagapolutele is “going to be special for many years to come,” Elliott said. “And that’s where it starts [for Cal].”

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