During the Larry Bird era I was on a commercial flight to New Orleans with the Celtics. They were playing an exhibition game there. The team occupied most of first class, (I was only a few rows back of it) and a few people from the organization were in coach.
All the flight attendants pretty much spent the whole flight in First Class with them.
Nothing on the SDMB has ever made me burst into laughter like this did. Oh, so so true.
Turns out that baseball is now making AA minor league teams fly on longer trips. Our local AA owner said he can’t afford that so he is moving to A level.
The airline I flew for used to do a lot of sports charters for the MLB, NFL, & NHL. And I flew a bunch of them. Here http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11576169&postcount=9 is a post I wrote 18 months ago for a similar question. I’ll try to avoid duplicating info here …
We used bog-standard airliners with no special seating. The difference is that with a typical team roster, each player got a set of 3 seats in coach to himself. First class was for the head coaches & related VIPs.
They’d fold down the seat backs & sorta make a big flat space & stretch out or play poker from when they got on the jet until when they left. We couldn’t have made them sit right & wear seatbelts if we’d tried.
For NFL, some gear would go in the belly, but they also had 2 or 3 small moving vans / box trucks which drove from the home city to the away game. It seems like MLB & NHL usually got all their gear on the jet. We definitely carried each player’s personal luggage with their civvies & such.
We also did a few college football charters per year. Same idea as the NFL. These were normally for the “big game” regional rivalries which had off-field build-ups before the game.
I can recall parking in Manhattan, KS between two rows of Cessnas & having to be very careful on taxi-out not to blow over a couple dozen. We (727-200) outweighed the next biggest airplane at the field by a factor of 100. There was no tug on the field which could move us, so if we goofed & got cornered we were screwed.
The food on these charters was pretty spectacular. For post-game flights both the quality & the quantity was enormous. I recall one dinner for an NFL team which was 24 oz T-bones, a nerf football-sized baked potato, and 2 giant theater sized (8 oz?) Snickers bars. They ate all the Snickers, most of the steaks and about 1/3rd of the potatoes. The trays had a hefty serving of some nicely-cooked broccoli, but most went untouched.
We got the same meals & I could handle most of the T-bone & barely half of the broccoli & potato, but even starting the Snickers was just too much. Then again, I hadn’t just spent 60 minutes up against Da Steelers.
I’ve written about this before, but the funny thing is the MLB players were the rowdy aggressive ones who tended to cause trouble. NFL was tough show-off guys, but management kept them on a pretty short leash. And NHL were gentlemen; well-behaved & generally polite. Very much the opposite of their sports’ on-field personas.
And yes, they were all a *lot *easier to deal with if they’d won versus if they’d lost. Easiest of all was going *to *the game. Everybody was pretty deep in their own head.
Portland has an MLS franchise that just started playing in the league. There was a news report recently about a contest to design the artwork for a team plane. The plane they are going to paint is owned by Alaska Airlines. So this looks at first glance like an MLS team will be chartering flights.
However it doesn’t actually say the Timbers will be flying on this particular plane. It may be just painted for publicity and has no other relationship to the team. Anyone have any inside dope?
Soccer teams in Europe will sometimes “concentrate” (direct translation from Spanish, I don’t know what would the be correct English term) the players in a hotel before a big at-home game. The players spend the last two or three nights at that hotel leaving it only for training trips, pretty much as if they were away. They may actually leave the hotel less than if they were away, as away trips often include some sightseeing or shopping.
Does that ever get done in US sports?
I the Habs fly in and out of St Hubert Airport, rather than Dorval, because it’s much closer to their practice facility and much more private. As it is, the players can’t go around town without being recognized and stopped for autographs or conversation; trying to get the whole team through the Dorval airport would be nearly impossible!
The very article you link to mentions that the plane will fly throughout the carrier’s network, so it’s primarily a publicity thing. I would imagine that if the plane were available to fly the team, it’s the one they would use, but if it’s operating flights elsewhere or out for maintenance, then any other plane will do. A quick glance at the MLS website suggests that it’s a 34-game season, and I image only half of those are road games, so the team won’t need the plane all that much. Given the distances traveled (e.g. to play in New York), air travel is the most logical, but these are still regular commercial planes.
I’m glad it made you laugh! You should see the McGill University goalie (Hubert Morin) talking to himself and twitching like a madman before hockey games. They were in the national championship (lost, unfortunately) and were showing him on TV…with his playoff beard he looked like someone I’d walk wide of and keep a wary eye on in the metro! Totally insane. Though these guys travel by bus most of the time, since university hockey isn’t exactly big around here (all the good players are in the QMJHL, AHL or NHL!)