Stars on Sports Intro: It's time for Stars on Sports! A podcast-radio show dedicated to sharing stories about our athletic program at Lansing Community College. LCC athletics has a strong tradition. 23 national championship wins! Over 170 All-Americans! 19 MCCAA all sports trophies! Stars on Sports will introduce you to individuals that have contributed to our program success and give you the backstory on what it takes to develop it. We'll also dive into and break down the topics and issues facing athletic departments across the nation and right here at LCC. This is Stars on Sports!

Hello and welcome to another episode of Stars on Sports. As usual, I am joined by our assistant AD Steven Cutter. And Steven, today we're going to be doing a. But some of the things we've covered that I still want to touch on is one of the biggest issues that our student athletes face is time management. And one of the things that, you know, me being from the high school level that we've talked some of my differences in the past is how that fits into their schedule and the travel aspect at this level compared to the high school level. That was one of the biggest differences for me is the travel at the high school level. A lot of local travel, most of your opponents are 30 minutes away, where at this level it's an hour and a half to two hours. Even my own travel, you know, traveling across the country for some events, some of the more national events as we record this, our basketball team just went on the road for the first time in over a month because we had a lot of home events and what that does to a team and how that impacts their routine or their schedule. The differences between being home and away. And even for my office, the differences of home and away. Like we have a home game coming up and I have to send out communication to all the people that are attending and making sure they're on the same page, where when you travel, it's usually a bus time and making sure everyone had that, making sure we have transportation, whether it's a bus, a van. Do you approach it differently? How does travel impact your program or even your difference from the different programs you've coached in the past?

Travel's a huge thing. We have a large roster, so anytime we travel, it's a large amount of people going into one place. So the buses, when you're on the charter buses, you need to be really organized and detailed on how you pack your stuff. Baseball and softball are sports that have multiple pieces of equipment, balls and everything else. So you need to be really organized when you have a large roster Also another piece of travel that you didn't necessarily hit on. But, you know, we're feeding our student athletes either before or after the event. And so depending on the roster size, it can be a large challenge. You know, when I speak about the baseball team and we have, you know, 45 players on the roster, we're not just going to roll into the local McDonald's after the game and expect to get any kind of service. So, you know, last year, I remember a couple times going into different places and we had a little smaller roster last year, but the workers saw the players coming in and took her hat and stuff off, and she said, I quit and walked out the door.

And we had that happen a couple of times. Actually. Our basketball team experienced that where they saw us coming in, they went and put the clothes sign on the door. And some of that was the pandemic, and some of that is the staffing of some of these restaurants, struggling to staff people. But, yes, you're right, that is one of the big difference between the high school and college. That setting is the food aspect. That at the high school setting, sometimes parents would prepare food for afterward. But we rarely stopped on the way home. A long time ago we used to, but that kind of faded away. But that is a big part of our current travel plans and making sure, because part of it is the length of the travel, that they are going farther and they're gone longer. But coaches have more strategy on looking for places when they go somewhere. When I host an event, I send out local restaurants that are close by and that might be accommodating to those teams that come in, because that's one of the positives of our program. We bring business into this community when teams travel. And I haven't done any, like, sponsorships or anything with it, but, you know, we want to promote local businesses and making sure that they are there to help these teams out, because that's one of the biggest questions I get, is where can we eat afterwards and what can we eat? But it's even more important as we travel on the road and preparing for that. And it seems like coaches have had to do more of that over the last couple years as we've dealt with difficult situations in the restaurant business. But you never want to see anybody quit or you don't want them to be frustrated that large teams are coming to their restaurant or establishment. But food is actually an important part of travel. Other routines during the. I mean, obviously it's different, you know, traveling and making sure they're there on Time and preparing the event, being on a long bus ride compared to being in your own facility. But time management is a key piece to our student athletes that when they travel, do they do homework on the bus, in your experience, do they rest? Do you see any patterns through travel?

It's really a combination of a lot of different things that they're doing. Some of them are being extremely productive, some of them are not. You'll see some of them catching up on their sleep. And one of the things that probably doesn't get talked about with the travel piece is when you play at home and the game's over and if you happen to lose, sometimes there's some frustration there, whether it's from coaches or kids. And that applies at the high school level, college level, at every level. When you're at home, you might have a locker room or something, you might have a little time in the locker room and bam, you're, you're in your vehicles and you're going home. So how people handle losing is all a little bit different. And when you're on the road, you get to experience all that when you have those couple hour bus rides plus back home. And, and sometimes that can create a very unique dynamic because maybe coaches do not want kids laughing and having fun or playing music loud or, you know, just different things because there's different expectations after losses. So from a coaching experience, you just kind of have to figure out what, what is okay and, and what's not okay. And you kind of got to blend it off of what the team looks like. I know this year when we were in our fall season, we didn't lose a whole lot of games last year and we're in our fall season and we, we got beat. And those, those games don't count. Those games are for learning and for seeing, you know, what, what the roster looks like. But we had freshmen on the bus that are hooting and hollering on the bus ride home. And I didn't say anything, I let it go. But I can tell you what, we had some really upset sophomores and they had some stuff to say the next day to them and about, you know, maybe, maybe you're used to losing, but we're not. We don't care if this is fall or anything else. And so that's an interesting dynamic versus when you're at home and you can just kind of go in the locker room, go your own way, and kids can do their own thing. So that's something that really doesn't get hit on a whole lot but there's quite a few videos out there of coaches going ballistic on buses and, and different in locker rooms after losses. And I don't know if that's, I agree with you.

I think it is something that's not hit on enough. And at the high school level the trend was in recent years is to go away from transportation or to have one way transportation. I remember years ago when we decided to not have weekend transportation and the student athlete had to get there themselves. And my coach said, well, if you're not on time, you don't play. And my principal's kid wasn't on time and he didn't play that day. And we ended up adapting that policy or looking at it. But how important that, you know, you mentioned home games where they do kind of straggle in or get in, where at away game there's valuableness to that bus ride and preparation and there is some difficulty in managing it, especially if you have more than one team on the bus and one team likes to have fun and the other one wants to be serious. There's some management issues and preparation issues on the bus. And even on the way home, win or lose, I think it's a good time to debrief and just be with your team where when we took that away from the high school, they rode home with their parents and probably got coached more, yelled at. I wasn't a great parent taking my kid home, revisiting the game for that 20 minutes. He'd rather ride the bus after, after riding home with me. And it's hard sometimes because back to our point of getting caught up in these events, but the travel time's important and even more so at this level when we're traveling, we're fortunate Lansing's in the center of the state and we're one of the most centrally located colleges in our league. So our transportation is less than other colleges, but we still travel an hour, hour and a half, two hours, sometimes three hours for our conference trip. Obviously we travel further if we're going to national tournaments. You know, you went to Enoch last year and travel has been one of the bigger things that as an ad I've experienced, but I haven't really reflected on how it impacts coaches and teams and the dimensions of it, including the food part of it. You know, how soon you want to get there. I mean, last year they implemented bat testing at your level. So, you know, figuring out how soon or how long that takes to get there. Because one of the things I've learned in this job over my 26 years and it is. I don't like messing with coaches in pre game. Coaches have a pretty regimented pre game ritual that they want to follow and getting their teams ready for the game. And I don't like interrupting that. And travel is a big part of that. Like some coaches want to be there early, some coaches want to stroll in and be ready to go. And it all plays into part of time management and how we deal with individuals and how we deal with, with getting our team ready to succeed. But do you have a plan on how soon you'd like to get to places? Do you think it's normal? Do you see that with some other baseball teams that you've come, that some come later, that you're worried about getting there and some are earlier thinking what are you guys doing here so early?

No, I think at least for our program we have a lot of structure and we figure out what times we need to be there and what needs to be accomplished in that time. There's baseball and softball is really unique because most of the stuff you're there for a long time before games start and we're talking hours and so you have to be pretty structured to come up with things that they're going to do that is going to be serving to them. So sometimes we're going to do things like what we call show and go's. We're literally going to get off the bus, stretch, throw and take the field. And Sometimes when it's 35 degrees and slight breeze, it's okay, you know, so you gotta have a little bit of feel for the situations that they're in.

And that's a whole nother aspect of the weather dealing with that. Last year was a challenging year, weather wise, both winter and spring and how that can impact drive time construction across the state you play into. We had a lot of teams late this fall fall in volleyball because they ran into construction in Grand Rapids or the Kalamazoo area. And I'm telling you that gets coaches frustrated if they're not there at a certain time and able to do what they want to do. I've had officials say we have to give them more warm up time or I had officials say no, we're starting on time and you have to manage that. But we just. Sometimes they take for granted the transportation aspect of the event. And even last year we were worried about even getting transportation, the shortage of bus drivers out there, company dealing with different fleet issues. But we've been very fortunate at LCC to manage through that, even going to Qualifying for the national championship in the World Series, short notice. We struggled to find a bus and needed to find some people we know to help us out in scheduling those buses. And the costs have gone up, gas has gone up. So you have to figure out all those thing that are all are part of travel that, you know, some coaches want to just show up and play and not even deal with any of the travel part. But you allude to getting there early and you know, talking about, you know, I know nutrition is a big part of your guys the baseball program and I know it is for other programs too that they have snacks or something available for student athletes because it's again back to time management and scheduling, how integral that is a part of everything that we do. That having a plan of when they're going to eat and maximize performance is another part of scheduling transportation and game day routine. And the coaches, it's very important, it is very important to them on whether they succeed or not, that game day routine. And especially when they're on the road and traveling.

Yeah. With the help of rdk, the baseball program has a whole schedule for when they're going to snack on the bus, what they're, what they're going to eat, what they're going to eat in the dugout, if they can have caffeine, if they're going to drink caffeine, at what point before the game can they drink caffeine? Which is, which in theory typically is about an hour before the game. For it to be beneficial, anything prior is not going to help a whole lot. And so if you have, if you have that structure, it helps with some of that and definitely in our sports helps with that downtime. They understand what they need to do, when they need to do it and it makes things a little more fluid.

It does help with that structure. And we've talked about technology before on this podcast and how important that is into our business too. But all those little things we're learning about nutrition, about mineral performance, about visualization, about rest time, about stretching and warming up and how specific we become in those routines, that they're all very important to perform at the highest level. And coaches are working hard on staying up to date on those and making sure they find something that works best for their team. As you alluded to that, I appreciated. Each team is different, each program is different. Some teams don't need to get there and warm up as much. And not just having a blanket for all of that or a standard college policy for all of that because each one is different in what they have to do when they get there. And we've talked about factors that impact that. Nutrition, length of travel, weather and all those are considered when we make those decisions on traveling. And it just, it's just something we take for granted most times that, you know, we just think teams show up and play, but there's a purpose on the way there and a purpose on the way home. And you know, we got 24 schools in the MCCA and in our division, most trips average around an hour and a half, but there are three hour bus rides out there that I would think you'd have to manage your team differently on the longer bus drive than, you know, not being too tired or not being too disengaged or, you know, mentally preparing for those contests, whether, you know, how long those contests last. And again, some sports travel together, some sports travel differently, but play double headers that to your point of nutrition and all those things play into maximizing performance, which in the end is what we're trying to do to be successful and compete at a high level. Anything else on travel that you can think of or.

Well, we used to have a couple buses, didn't we?

We did. I do believe we still have two buses. I think they're over on west campus with the LCC logo on there. But it's my understanding of with the demand of how much the school needs it and the lack of bus drivers out there that we've. We've gone to contracting out and using a company that helps manage our program for us. I believe we also have five to seven vans plus an suv. And you know, you've had to use the vans before for your large teams. And some of our teams use vans when they travel overnight. Other teams that come in use vans more regularly and they're just different pros and cons to, to the different means of transportation out there. But yeah, right now with where the transportation business is, we are using other companies to help manage it. And it's a company that scheduled a lot of college athletics across the country. So, you know, they're very well connected and helped us out. This year has been a lot better than last year and finalizing those schedules and securing transportation where last year there was some anxiety there on whether we would have it, especially the trips that we didn't plan out as far ahead because we didn't know we were gonna qualify for them.

But why do you think that last year there was such an issue for buses or bus drivers, but this year there isn't.

What changed you know, it's interesting. It's kind of similar to the official piece the society talks about the shortage of officials out there. They seem to go hand in hand. The shortage of officials or shortage of bus drivers. And I think at the economy, I think it's motivation. I think it with the pandemic of people being maybe nervous of being on buses. I think last year a lot of those things played into it that there just was a shortage of bus drivers. I knew high schools last year that were paying families to have them drive their kids to school because they couldn't get bus driving at that level out east in Maine or New Hampshire or something. So I think it was a national crisis and it seemed to be better this year. I didn't think they thought it was going to be much better as things turned around. I'm sure they've increased salaries and such, but it is definitely a big difference for us this year so far. Knock on wood of the availability of buses. And I'm thinking that maybe the staffing is up or they're paying better and it's just all around maybe a better economic. I'm not seeing that in our officials piece, but maybe the bus driver piece is of better supply of them. But I don't have the answer to that. I'm guessing here. I'm just predicting and listening to what I've heard from.

There's still a shortage of officials, too. Do you still see that?

Yes. Yeah, I think there's a significant shortage. I think we're. We're band aiding it. I think we're hiding it. I think we're just plugging holes here and there. I think people don't realize the shortage there. Our official clientele is older. We're wearing them out because we're asking more of them because there is a shortage of them. Maybe not so much at our particular level, but I think it is at our level. I know that there's other levels that have canceled contests or moved contests because of a shortage of officials in all sports, not just a particular sport. I think I have my own reasons why I think that is. I think a lot of people blame sportsmanship on that issue. Some of it is the age of officials. I think some of it is the new student coming into sport. You know, you got to make quick decisions and you get yelled at one way or the other whether you make that decision. I'm sure we're not preparing people to be in those positions. That's why I think it should be in the curriculum that schools that teach these Kids. And that's why I think it's important for people to experience being official because see how uneasy it is. It's difficult to be an official and make split decisions. And as I've learned watching all the instant replays on TV of how right they actually are on a lot of these or even how tough it is after instant replay to make these calls. But I think it's a society thing. I think it's something we, we need to address. I know a lot of levels are trying to address it, but I'm not sure we're making head waves yet. And it's just really trying to get a younger pool in supporting them, trying to teach them to succeed and protecting them from all the criticism that they receive on making one call. Because 50% of the people aren't happy with the call they make. Especially the more end of a game call. Every call throughout the game makes a difference at the game, but the more like attention to that call it makes. But that'd be a whole nother podcast talking about officials and the shortage and things to do to help improve that. And you know, I've been part of the process at other levels to try and make that happen. And I think that's still something that we have a lot of work to do yet on it.

Right. Most of the officials are good. They don't take the field of their court with some bias towards one team or another. I mean, some of them aren't great, but. But most of them are really good. And they hear a lot of different things. And you got to be able to deflect some of that. It'd be like going on social media and believing and buying into everything people are saying about you. If it's bad, it doesn't matter. It's just. It's somebody else's opinion. And when you got parents in the stands, you know, I was at a basketball game recently, and there were some parents in the stands that were extremely adamant about poor officiating and how things were not equal. And I don't think the officials are out there trying to make things not equal. They're just calling things like they see them. Most of those are their opinions as well. What they think is a foul or what they think is a ball or a strike. And so you really have to kind of respect that piece of it because it's their opinion. They're in charge of the game. You might not agree with that opinion. It might have been a terrible call. But we don't have instant replay at this level. At Least not yet. And you have to roll with it.

And I'm not sure instant replay is an answer after seeing some of these plays that you think the instant replays shows that they should be overturned or kept. And the other way goes, I do,

because we've had, we video all this stuff and then we're, you know, after the game, I'm like, hey, you got to look at this. This was. You were really wrong on this. So if we would have had of instead replay it have been overturned.

So you see us going to robots official in the future. Well, there's a shortage and the minor league is trying some of that with plate officials. And again, I think video replay can be good. I think it lengthens some of the games because some of the tough calls. But to your point is, I work hard on protecting our officials. They're one of the group that when they come here, I want to make sure they're well taken care of. There's been way too much violence with officials after contests across the country. Too many stories of officials getting abused after.

You don't have, you won't have that problem with robots. I mean, their feelings aren't going to get hurt if you're yelling at them. I mean, it's just not going to matter.

People still will be mad at their calls and they'll find different ways to attack them. It's just that important throughout the game. And I've always been a believer official can't cost you a game. There's so many things that go into winning or losing a game, although you see that if it's the last play. But there were many plays before that that could have impacted the game too. We focus on the last play and we focus on the officials. Compared. Did your son or daughter miss a free throw or make a mistake or an error? Did your coach do something? Did the AD have the light too bright or too dark or too hot or too cold in the facility? So there's just so many variables. But for some reason, the officials are the ones that seem to be under the most scrutiny. And I think that led to a shortage. Again, I wasn't expecting to talk about officials today. I think that's a whole other podcast we can visit down the line. But it did lead in from our conversation on travel and how important travel is into the athletic department and game day routine. And then talking about the shortage of bus drivers led us into the shortage of officials. But as always, very good conversation. Spent much more time than I thought. But always enjoy talking those kind of issues with you and helps me as I go back to the office and solve these problems for our student athletes. So great job today, Steven.

Thank you.

Stars on Sports Outro: Stars on Sports is recorded live at the WLNZ studios. Engineering and production assistance are provided by Daedalian Lowry. You can listen to this episode and other episodes of Stars on Sports on demand at LCCconnect.org to find more information about our athletic program, visit LCCstars.com thanks for listening. Go Stars!