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Keith Strudler: Cancelling Flights And Games

Even in the best of situations, air travel kind of stinks. It’s crowded, uncomfortable, and largely makes most people feel like a character in a George Orwell novel. That’s assuming things run on schedule and according to plan, which, as you know, they often don’t. Which means instead of a five-hour experience, it could mean sleeping on an airport floor after your connecting flight was cancelled. You’re not a veteran traveler until you’ve sprinted to the check-in line of another airline hoping to catch the last seat to a city in the same time zone of where you hope to eventually go.

Of course, few industries are more travel dependent than professional sports. Unlike business meetings, it’s pretty impossible to have a baseball game over WebEx. Essentially, for any two sports teams to compete, they have to be in the same room at the same time. In some sports with lots of games, that could mean multiple cities in a single week. For months on end. Now to make this easier and certainly more comfortable, most big-time pro and even major college teams charter their own planes. So when a game ends at 11 p.m. in Minneapolis and you’ve got a game the next night in Phoenix, everyone can go directly over to some private airfield without two-hour security lines and relax in a customized jet with ample legroom. And without delays and cancellations and all the other things that make traveling feel a bit like combat duty.

Such is not the case for the WNBA, the women’s pro league that plays a 34-game regular season that runs from May through September. Unlike the far more fiscally endowed NBA, WNBA teams travel commercial. So just like the rest of us. Which is how the Las Vegas Aces ended up arriving at their hotel in DC at 3:45 Friday afternoon some 26 hours after they started their trip out west. Their original flight was cancelled after a long delay, forcing them to catch a wee hour of the morning flight to Dallas before eventually jumping on a connecting plane to Washington. Which means a full night of hanging out in airport gates on stand by eating Cinnabon and Pizza Hut. Which, to be clear, is not great preparation for a professional basketball game against the Mystics at 8 p.m. Friday night, a game that was crucial in Aces’ chase for a playoff spot.

So, after consulting the Players’ Union, the team collectively decided that they would not play Friday’s game, citing fatigue and injury risk. They didn’t forfeit. They simply said that they would not, or I suppose could not play. With that, fans receive refunds and the WNBA needs to figure out a policy on what to do when a team won’t play because of weather delays along the Rockies.

I’m sure public opinion is divided on the call, although WNBA brass was not. League president Lisa Borders declared the game a forfeit loss for the Aces and shared her disappointment on the team not taking to the court. Conversely, the Players’ Union wants to form a task force to create better policies around player travel. Like not routing them through Dallas on a red-eye. And more than a few voices have declared that WNBA athletes are treated like second class citizens, especially compared to the five-star lifestyle of their male counterparts.

All of which raises a couple of interesting questions, none of which really have much to do with the horrid state of air travel in the US. First, should the league have punished the Aces with a loss? My short answer is probably yes, as politically incorrect as that may sound. There is nothing pleasant about what the team went through, and I’d guess they’d play worse than normal, up to and including falling asleep on the bench. But such is the nature of their business, where attendance is mandatory. Changing that perspective for travel is likely a working definition of the slippery slope argument.

The bigger question, of course, is does the League need to change travel procedures? Or better put, does the League need to start treating its athletes like true professional athletes, not glorified semi-pros? The answer to that isn’t so simple. At the essence of this is the place of pro women’s team sports in the US, which take a remote back seat in the minds and wallets of fans and broadcasters and sponsors – in other words, the people who finance the operation. So as much as the way WNBA athletes get from city to city serves as a reminder of gender inequity in our country, it’s also hard to spend money you don’t have. And if you remove gender from this equation – which is hard to do – know that lots and lots of aspiring golfers and tennis players and triathletes and marathoners, male and female, they also travel by bus and car and red eye to make the next match. That is the nature of aspirational sport and its participants, perhaps commonly known as the journey.

I suppose we all hoped the WNBA and women’s pro basketball had already arrived. At least by this metric, I suppose it hasn’t. Just like Aces.

Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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