Syracuse has traveled about 8,500 miles back and forth to nine games away from the Carrier Dome. If SU flew that mileage in a straight line, the team could travel to Warsaw, Poland, and back.

While it hasn’t actually left the country, the No. 19 Orange (8-7, 0-5 Atlantic Coast) has embraced the role of a traveling team for much of the season. Carrier Dome scheduling and the geographic diversity of the ACC means Syracuse has spent plenty of time on the move in the last two months. It’s created challenges — both in terms of practice planning and what to do in the long hours of travel — that SU’s struggled to solve to the tune of a 4-5 record when playing outside Syracuse.

SU’s trip to Oregon in February was Syracuse’s longest of the season, and it accounted for almost half the team’s total mileage. Since then the Orange has flown twice more and bused numerous times.

Sophomore goalie Asa Goldstock remembers watching Syracuse while growing up and seeing how the Orange was “always somewhere.” While her high school team visited Florida over spring break, the rest of her games were relatively local.

“I knew I’d get a lot of aerial views from the plane when I came here,” Goldstock said.

On the other hand, freshman midfielder Sam Swart was blown away by the amount of travel Syracuse has done. The concept of playing away from the Carrier Dome didn’t even occur to her.

“I was just thinking we’d be in the Dome,” Swart said. “I thought all the games were gonna be here, I don’t know why I was thinking that. I was dumb. Not all of the games were in the Dome, for anybody reading this.”

A hiccup in scheduling led to some of the inconvenient traveling. When schedules normally would be made, there were conflicts with scheduled Carrier Dome renovations, Gait said. By the time the Orange could finalize its schedule, most other teams had nearly completed theirs. That forced SU to settle for road games at odd, midweek times, Gait said.

The scheduling trouble led in part to two separate road trips that featured two away games in three days, on a Thursday followed by a Saturday. The first trip resulted in two SU losses, to Notre Dame and Northwestern. More recently, Syracuse beat Loyola (Maryland) on a Thursday but fell to Virginia Tech two days later.

“I think (the travel) was the difference versus Virginia (Tech),” Swart said. “There was just too much going on in such little time.”

The Orange passes the time travel days with a pastime that’s taken over much of the athletic world: Fortnite. Goldstock said Nicole Levy brings her Xbox. It’s not much different than at SU, Goldstock said, just that teammates hang out in a hotel room instead of around campus. And Goldstock conceded that Levy is the best player, ranking herself as a close second.

Simpler challenges than who’s the best Fortnite player come up when a team travels as much as Syracuse, though. The most recent road trip was the trek from Loyola in Baltimore to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. On what Swart termed a nine-hour bus ride, many of her teammates slept or watched TV shows, like Goldstock’s favorite “Riverdale” and “Law & Order: SVU.” But Swart did neither.

“I can’t sleep on the bus,” Swart said. “I only trust my mom driving, that’s it. I don’t trust bus drivers, no offense, they’re all great. I kind of just sit there and look out the window, visualizing myself on the field.”

Once at VT, the Orange lost in double-overtime. Swart, lacking sleep and having visualized herself on the field, did end up with a hat trick. But the trip ended as all three of SU’s ACC road contests have ended thus far: a one-goal loss.

Swart did find one benefit in the travels despite the loss.

“We hit Virginia and we cross the border, you just see the sun,” Swart said. “And I was like, this is so weird. Seeing the sun again was definitely a nice little touch in my life.”

Published on April 17, 2018 at 9:09 pm

Contact Billy: wmheyen@syr.edu | @Wheyen3