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The challenges of playing a college football game in Ireland: paperwork, fried chicken
And to think, when this game was first scheduled, it was supposed to be in Massachusetts.
Instead, Georgia Tech and Boston College will open their 2016 seasons and ACC campaigns Saturday on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, in Dublin, Ireland.
The game is one part civic outreach and one part corporate branding, but for Georgia Tech football operations director Mike Huff, it was a year of work.
Dublin is less than 4,000 miles away from Atlanta — a haul, no doubt, but nothing too crazy when it comes to time in the air (It would take an extra three and a half hours to fly to the University of Hawaii, for instance.) But it wasn’t the physical travel that made Huff’s job as the logistics manager of the team so difficult over the last year — it was putting on a football game in a place that has only a cursory understanding of football and American culture.
An American layman would be overwhelmed handling the logistics of a routine road game, and while Huff was hardly overwhelmed, the trip to Dublin proved to be anything but routine for him and his staff.
You can’t blame the hosts — they honestly didn’t know any better than to think the coaches’ box should be a few rows up from field level. Why would you want to coach all the way up in the rafters? And who could blame anyone at Aviva Stadium, the host venue, for not knowing how much space 75 football players and their equipment use? They’re used to soccer and rugby teams using the facility.
Those things were sorted out without drama, Huff said, but it highlighted how much nuanced work went into putting on the game — and Georgia Tech isn’t even the home team.
In a profession where every detail counts, Huff couldn’t take anything for granted.
Georgia Tech's chartered flight landed in Dublin Wednesday with 207 people — every player and coach, the training staff, video staff, equipment guys, radio crew, cheerleaders, and sports information directors. The band, whose traveling party consisted of roughly 150 people, flew separately.
Huff, of course, is responsible for feeding all 207. That’s tough enough in Atlanta, but add in subtle cultural differences in cuisine, like the hotel's recipe for fried chicken -- “I don’t know if it was the flour, but it wasn’t going to work” -- or bacon, which in Ireland is closer to the Canadian version than the pork belly the Yellow Jackets are used to eating, and you again see the level of detail necessary to make a trip like this work. Thanks to a few international phone calls from a chef from the hotel the team stays at when they play teams in North Carolina, the chicken recipe was fixed and the right kind of bacon was procured. (It must be something with the Irish -- Huff said he asked the North Carolina chef to make a call when the team traveled to play at Notre Dame last season.)
Getting the cereal right was another story.
The Yellow Jackets' dietitian might not like it much, but the team eats Lucky Charms at breakfast.
Well, you can’t get Lucky Charms in Ireland -- many of the cereals we eat stateside aren’t sold in the European Union because they’re too sugary -- so the hotel staff had no idea what they were when they were requested.
You can image how awkward it was for Huff’s assistant, Craig Candeto, to explain to the Irish who Lucky the Leprechaun was.
Then came the rooms. A double bed in Europe is not quite the same size as an American double -- “these beds were not made for larger individuals” -- so Huff and his staff had to size up every room and player and push some beds together to make sure everyone had enough space.
The offensive linemen are in the bigger rooms -- the family suites -- while the defensive backs and A-backs in the smaller rooms. Tough break, little guy.
Anyone who has updated their passport recently might presume that the toughest challenge of taking a football team to Ireland would be getting everyone the proper documentation, but Huff said that was the easiest part of it all, thanks to some help from the Atlanta Falcons, who played in London two years ago. They put Huff in touch with a company that came to the facility in May and July and processed 79 passports with ease.
Getting the proper documentation for the kicking tee was not as easy. Georgia Tech cargo shipped a good deal of equipment to Ireland because of space concerns on the plane -- normally they’d transport it to a road game with an 18-wheeler -- but they couldn’t just toss the equipment in trunks and meet it on the other side.
No, Georgia Tech had to fill out Carnets — for everything.
“To the nearest band-aid."
That’s a list of every item in the trunk, the cost of those items, and where Georgia Tech bought them. It’s not quite showing the receipt for every chinstrap, but it’s not far off.
“Punt Windham and our equipment guys -- it’s probably taken over his life the last three months … It’s been a process, it’s not that much fun,” Huff said.
Huff also had to help organize the cultural events -- the team will spend Thursday night in the town of Portmarnock, where they’ll have dinner and see a show, and then spend Friday on a city tour of Dublin in an open-air bus.
And after all of that, a football game -- an important one, too. No one wants to start the season 0-1, but it’s especially bad to start the conference campaign 0-1 in the wide-open ACC Coastal. Georgia Tech coach Paul Johnson is a noted hater of night games, so the kickoff time had to bring a smile to his face — 12:30 p.m. Irish Standard Time, or 7:30 a.m. back in Atlanta and 4:30 a.m. in Los Angeles.
When the game is over, the Yellow Jackets get to fly back and get ready to host Mercer on Sept. 10.
Having to deal with all of that, just to play a conference opener, might make a sane man go mad -- truth be told, the equipment staff might need a beer or two once the shipped equipment arrives back in Atlanta -- but Huff said he enjoyed the challenge.
“Everything has just been a concern, but that’s more about how I am -- if I get comfortable something’s not right,” Huff said. “But I like doing it."
