Road trips, long days and little rest: Butler County athletes push limits in travel sports grind
There’s a lot more than meets the eye with student-athletes’ efforts to be seen by college recruits nowadays. Good sleep and full days at home are hard to come by. Sitting in a car for hours at a time leads to a stiff neck and sore back.
“Then you play a baseball game,” Knoch pitcher Zane Pacek said.
Or basketball. Or softball. Or soccer.
Travel and club sports involve hours of travel to far-away tournaments and events and have become a calendar-filling commitment for many high school athletes looking to further their athletic careers. So much for an offseason, huh?
They post their highlights and offers on their social media feeds, but what goes unnoticed are the distances traveled and the time it takes to to get to their next tournament or event.
Seneca Valley rising senior and Ohio Outlaws pitcher/utility player Abby Kalkowski and her mother have flown to several different states for competitions.
Butler boys hoops standout Andrew Gettinger hopes to use the sport as a vehicle to college and a career, so he reclines his car seat on trips for Caveman Basketball, doing his best to sleep through hours-long drives.
“The ride’s not bad. It’s just getting out of the car and your legs are dead and then you have to play,” Gettinger said.
From the end of May to the end of July — right after his high school season on the diamond — Pacek’s time was consumed by traveling to play baseball for Fennell Bros. Express.
Pacek, Gettinger and North Catholic rising senior Jason Fredericks have all stopped in several major cities in or around Pennsylvania.
“You go home, sleep for a few hours, get up, go to another camp,” Pacek said. “You’re just running around crazy. ... You’re either playing baseball, going to sleep or driving to different place. You don’t really have time to relax and get your body right.”
Fredericks plays AAU hoops for Win Today Basketball. He’s attracted interest from Division I and Division II programs while playing in spurts from April through July.
“Athletes are always going, going, going — never stop,” Fredericks said. “It’s always good to have a stop, but also, you want to prove to everybody that you can make it to the next level. ... Most people play just in high school and they’re just done.”
Between tournaments and camps, Pacek said he’s been home “maybe a day, max. Probably 12 hours if you’re really traveling crazy. That’s what my summer’s been like.”
Butler rising senior wrestler Santino Sloboda, a Pitt commit, drives to Washington, Pa., three days a week with Golden Tornado teammates to practice at the Quest School of Wrestling. Compared to his time in travel wrestling, beginning when he was 8 with slates that ran from December until March, the trip is a slight inconvenience.
“There’s no way that I could do that nowadays,” Sloboda said, looking back on the workload. “We were literally in a different state every single weekend. ... I just remember every time I’d come back, my teachers would be kind of mad because I would miss two days of school every single week.
“They’d be like, ‘You’re not ever going to be caught up if you keep missing school.’”
Kalkowski started playing travel softball when she was 9.
“I feel like I’ve been doing it so long that you kind of get used to it,” Kalkowski said, pointing to a learned ability to know when to push herself.
The competitive aspect is what draws Mars rising senior girls soccer midfielder Maeve O’Leary to club soccer. With Northern Steel Dash, she enjoys the challenge of squaring off against opponents with different skillsets.
Outside of the high school season, O’Leary said her club team practices 2-3 times a week. Travel for competition begins in February and runs well into the summer.
“Just being able to be busy, I feel like I don’t really like being bored,” O’Leary said. “So having something to do all the time is just really exciting for me.”
Student-athletes frequently have to turn down other, more relaxing invites.
“Whenever friends ask you what you’re doing or whenever you want to go hang out, or you’re talking to your girlfriend, you’re like, ‘I’ve got baseball practice. I’ve got a baseball game. I’m not going to be home. I’m not in town,’” Pacek said. “It gets a little frustrating sometimes because you want to hang out with people and have a social life.”
Others don’t always understand the work Pacek has to put in. To earn a Division I offer, he said: “You have to do so much extra and go so many more places to be seen.” Gettinger has seen his friends enjoying their down time while at or on the way to travel basketball events.
“You don’t get to do a lot of stuff that the other kids do,” he said. “You can see a lot of that online, on people’s (social media) stories and stuff, them having a blast and then you’re out here grinding. It messes with you mentally, but you just have to remind yourself that what you’re doing is for the bigger picture.”
Pacek enjoys exploring other regions. He’s made a tradition out of going to different nearby zoos and aquariums, keeping an eye out for sharks at the latter. The supermarket Publix tops his list of places to eat.
“Saxonburg is a small town,” Pacek said. “It’s your quaint, little town that you see every now and then, but going to all these other cities and places, (it’s fun) just to see what their community is like and what type of food they have around, what people do for fun around there.”
“You get to get away from your personal bubble at your home and everything,” O’Leary said. “You get to meet new people with going places and just kind of get outside your comfort zone and kind of see what the real life is like.”
Fredericks looks back fondly on a three-and-a-half-hour van ride with his teammates to a tournament in Lancaster. Sloboda described the regular trips with his family as feeling like “mini vacations” and remembers visiting Muhammad Ali’s gravestone in Louisville.
“A lot of people think that it’s kind of a hassle going across the country ... for a tournament, but I think that it’s more fun than it seems,” Sloboda said. “Especially when you’re going with your friends, that’s some of the most memorable things that I’ve ever done with my life.”
The grueling workload has also paid off for Pacek, who received his first Division I offer, from Central Michigan, earlier this month and committed Monday to the Chippewas. Gettinger is awaiting offers, Kalkowski hopes to play college softball somewhere in the PSAC and O’Leary has received interest from schools. O’Leary said she’s “still on the fence” about playing collegiately because academics are her first priority.
“It comes with its downs and ups, but I think it’s worth it,” Gettinger said.
