MORGANTOWN — Nikki-Izzo Brown has one hope from what comes out of conference realignment.
“Hopefully we’ll make so much money that they’ll give me a big private jet that seats 100 people and we can all go together,” the WVU women’s soccer coach said.
She says it with a smile on her face, knowing full well that Air Izzo-Brown is likely not in the cards in the near future.
The Mountaineers sure could use it, though.
As college football and realignment have changed the definition of what a “conference” game actually is, it’s the Olympic sports that will face the largest obstacles while crisscrossing the country.
Few schools in the country know that effect like WVU, the farthest-east school in a midwestern league for the last 11 years.
The Mountaineers will have company this season, with the Big 12’s expansion into the Mountain Time Zone with BYU.
In the years to come, West Coast schools like USC and UCLA will see their sports travel thousands of miles to the East Coast to play a Big Ten game.
“Ideally, if someone would ask me, let football be football and just regionalize all the rest of our sports,” Izzo-Brown said. “The travel is going to get real interesting for everybody, from the Big Ten to the rest of us.”
As it stands, the Mountaineers — coming off a Big 12 tournament championship in 2022 while returning one of the nation’s top goalkeepers in Kayza Massey — are preparing for one of their shortest road trips of the season.
They open the season at No. 4 Duke on Thursday in what is a non-conference schedule that also features matches against No. 5 Virginia and No. 10 Penn State.
Once Big 12 play begins in Sept., the Mountaineers will be in a new league that features NCAA-tournament participants Texas and TCU, while league favorite BYU made it to the round of 16 last season and UCF advanced to the second round.
The all-play format has been scrapped. WVU isn’t scheduled to play BYU this season (as well as Texas Tech and Baylor), even though the Big 12 expanded from nine to 10 league games this season.
When Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado join the Big 12 in 2024, it further complicates league scheduling.
“Us coaches have looked with the scheduler to see what it’s going to look like if we go to 11 games or stay at 10. Everything is so fluid now,” Izzo-Brown said. “There’s been no information going forward if it’s going into divisional play. I think everything is still new.”
New and seemingly further away from Morgantown, which could seemingly test the limits of WVU’s Olympic sports and the athletics department led by Wren Baker.
“There’s so many different elements that we’re just not sure of,” Izzo-Brown said. “With football, they charter (flights), but in women’s soccer, we don’t have that luxury. What schools do you really have to charter to and what schools can we go commercial? Are we taking a day and a half to get to a place? Those are things I hope Wren and his staff will work through, but there is a little bit of worry in making sure the student-athlete comes first.”
With that comes other concerns, Izzo-Brown said, like her athletes keeping up with academics while possibly crossing two time zones on a commercial flight.
“Our beast is totally different, because we play two games in one week,” Izzo-Brown said. “Two-game weeks, my biggest concerns are where do you put an off day and when do these kids take classes? That’s the forefront of my concerns.”
