NCAA Asks for Patience on Potential Travel Problems During March Madness

To the long list of annual headaches for the NCAA basketball selection committees this time of year — weighing resumes, assessing player injuries, balancing the bracket — add a new one: working around the challenges presented by travel problems brought on by the crisis in the Middle East and a limited number of available charter aircraft.

“We certainly understand that there are pressures on the system, but we hope they’re not going to be too disruptive and really impact people’s experiences. We’ll do everything we can to mitigate that,” Keith Gill, chairman of the men’s NCAA tournament selection committee, said Wednesday as reported by the Associated Press. “One of the things that I’ve heard is ICE is taking up a lot of charter planes. I think the charter market is just demonstrably different than it has been.”

 The committee tries to keep higher-seeded teams relatively close to home, essentially as a reward for a strong season, but there’s a logistical benefit too: teams closer than 400 miles from their tournament site are eligible for a ground transportation reimbursement, while those that are farther away can book charter flights through the NCAA’s travel service.

To make sure all parties were aware of any potential problems this year, the NCAA sent a memo to athletic directors and head coaches of men’s and women’s Division I basketball teams late last month warning of a shortage of charter planes and “the potential TSA impact of the partial government shutdown.”

Travel obstacles are not supposed to be a factor when seeding and bracketing the tourney fields. Gill insisted committee members will not stray from that charge this weekend.

“I would say that certainly we feel like it will be able to be managed, and certainly we sent that memo out just to give people some understanding, hey, please be patient,” Gill said. “We’re going to focus on making sure that people have the best experience they can.”